Tag: Australian artist
Lucy Culliton
Saturday, October 25th, 2014 Art Column,Matisse said an artist should look at everything as if seeing it for the first time. No Australian artist better captures this thrill of perpetual discovery than Lucy Culliton. Although she is now of an age that permits a mid-career survey, Culliton has an energy and enthusiasm that puts most teenagers to shame. Culliton lives […]
Joshua Yeldham
Saturday, October 18th, 2014 Art Column,Artists are always happy to portray their work as a spiritual journey but Joshua Yeldham is more convincing than most. His mid-career survey at the Manly Art Gallery & Museum is a unique experience – less of an exhibition than a single work of art divided into different segments that unfold over time. This holistic […]
The Acute Misfortune of Adam Cullen
Saturday, October 18th, 2014 Blog,Adam Cullen’s brief but eventful career was one long exercise in attention-seeking behaviour. My habitual reaction to such antics is to ignore them – to refuse to provide the oxygen of commentary, criticism, indignation that feeds self-obsession. Now that it’s all over, and Erik Jensen has immortalised the artist in a small, tragic memoir titled […]
Arthur Boyd: An Active Witness
Saturday, June 28th, 2014 Art Column,Arthur Boyd (1920-99) was one of Australian art’s leading painters and one of its greatest mysteries. In the preface to her comprehensive biography, published in 2007, Darleen Bungey quotes Boyd’s youngest daughter, Polly, who calls her father “an enigma, probably one of the most secret people on earth.” This also acts as a disclaimer for […]
Encounters with Bali & Une Australienne: Hilda Rix Nicholas
Saturday, June 14th, 2014 Art Column,It would be fascinating to know how many art collections begin with an epiphany. The term, immortalised by James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, refers to a sudden revelation, a moment of heightened consciousness. For Dr. John Yu that moment arrived one day in the late 1970s, when his […]
George Gittoes
Saturday, June 7th, 2014 Art Column,George Gittoes has given us the most horrible show in Sydney in 2014, or perhaps it’s the year’s greatest horror show. However one defines it, George Gittoes: I Witness at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery is a harrowing experience. Gittoes (b.1949) cut his teeth in the early 1970s with psychedelic paintings and puppet shows at Sydney’s […]
Bill Brown
Saturday, May 3rd, 2014 Art Column,Many years ago, when I was still a baby art critic, I remember Bill Brown at a party bawling drunkenly that he was the best painter in Australia. Having never seen his work I was in no position to argue. Shortly afterwards, Brown had a solo exhibition at the old Macquarie Galleries. If he was […]