Blog
William Delafield Cook (1936-2015)
Friday, May 15th, 2015 Blog,In an article of 1979, Bryan Robertson, a curator who did much to advance the cause of Australian art in London, wrote that William Delafield Cook’s paintings seemed to have “no discernible ‘Australian’ qualities.” Yet Cook, who spent much of his career living and working in Britain, remained devoted to the Australian landscape, never showing […]
FROM GALLIPOLI
Saturday, May 2nd, 2015 Blog,There’s a lonely stretch of hillocks: There’s a beach asleep and drear: There’s a battered broken fort beside the sea. There are sunken trampled graves: And a little rotting pier: And winding paths that wind unceasingly. There’s a torn and silent valley: There’s a tiny rivulet With some blood upon the stones beside its mouth. […]
Anzac Evolution
Saturday, April 25th, 2015 Blog,Looking at Australia in the years before and after the First World War, one feels like asking: “What went wrong?” There was so much happening in those early years of nationhood, so many glorious ideals forged in the war itself, that the post-war years can only be seen as a lost opportunity. Constitutional historian, Helen […]
FROM GALLIPOLI
Saturday, April 18th, 2015 Blog,When George Lambert travelled to the battlefields of Gallipoli in February 1919 he found a landscape transformed into “a perfect rabbit warren’, riven with trenches and littered with bones. “The jackals, damn them were chorusing their hate, the bones showed up white even in the faint dawn, and I felt rotten,” he wrote. “The worst […]
Michael Schlieper (1947-2015)
Saturday, April 18th, 2015 Blog,Artists with superior technical abilities are often studies in disappointment. When you can paint like an Old Master it is depressing to see the kind of stuff that turns up in Biennales and public collections. Neither can one un-learn abilities that have become second nature. It’s a predicament that breeds fatalism. Michael Schlieper had all […]
What Betty Knew
Saturday, April 11th, 2015 Blog,Betty Churcher (1931-2015) knew that if you wanted the best loans for an international exhibition you had to get the museum directors of the world to go along with the journey. This required an initial charm offensive followed by a persuasive argument about the nature of the show you were proposing. It couldn’t be a […]
Betty Churcher
Saturday, April 4th, 2015 Blog,Betty Churcher was one of those rare figures who could bring the world of art alive for the general public. In this, she was a woman out-of-step with an era that has seen the visual arts develop its own impenetrable jargon and snobberies. This was anathema to Churcher, a born educator whose love of her […]
Learning from Peter Lik
Saturday, March 14th, 2015 Blog,One day, with a photographer friend, I wandered into the Peter Lik Gallery in Cairns. It felt more like a chintzy tourist restaurant than an art gallery. The lights were low, the walls painted a charcoal colour. The furniture was new and gleaming, music played in the background. Lik’s landscape photographs were hung thickly on […]
Colin Lanceley 1938-2015
Saturday, March 7th, 2015 Blog,Although he withdrew from the art scene suffering from declining health and a growing sense of disenchantment, Colin Lanceley’s work was one long chorus of joie-de-vivre. To look at his paintings from any period is to see an artist who believed, with Matisse, that art should be a celebration of life and beauty. In Lanceley’s […]
The Artist as Professional
Saturday, February 28th, 2015 Blog,In 1903 Cézanne wrote to his dealer, Ambrose Vollard: “Must art indeed be a priesthood, demanding that the faithful be bound to it body and soul?” Today the question would be greeted with derision. Art in the 21st century is not a spiritual calling, it is a profession. The artist is not motivated by inner […]