Tag: landscape
Jenny Sages
Thursday, July 28th, 2016 Blog,“As artists we’re not nearly as interesting as writers,” Jenny Sages once confessed. “We’re all just finger painting, but when someone gives me a sentence I can remember, it triggers something very strong inside me.” In one of her new works Sages quotes a poem by Anna Akhmatova, the words picked out in tiny perforations […]
Sally Gabori
Friday, July 8th, 2016 Art Column,Indigenous art is never purely “abstract” but it comes mighty close in the works of Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori (c.1924-2015), the subject of a eye-opening retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery. Gabori’s paintings may refer to Bentick Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where she lived until the age of 24, but to call her […]
Arthur Streeton & Kevin Lincoln
Friday, May 27th, 2016 Art Column,“If we so choose we can yet be the elect of the world, the last of the pastoralists, the thoroughbred Aryans in all their nobility.” These words were penned by J.S.MacDonald in the special Arthur Streeton Number of Art in Australia, October 1931. At the time MacDonald was director of the National Art Gallery of New […]
Jan Senbergs
Thursday, May 12th, 2016 Art Column,There is one painting in Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at the National Gallery of Victoria that should strike a chord with every true artist. The Swimmer (1995) shows a small figure battling his way through dark, choppy waves, with no shoreline in sight. It conjures up those moments in the studio when inspiration disappears, […]
Head On 2016
Friday, May 6th, 2016 Art Column,Sydney loves grand, all-encompassing events, and Head On has become one of the most eagerly awaited festivals in the cultural calendar. This year’s show is distributed among 60 public and private venues spread throughout the city, the suburbs, and other parts of the state. Twenty major international photographers will be participating in talks and workshops […]
Guy Warren
Friday, April 29th, 2016 Art Column,Guy Warren is the best proof that a positive attitude is the secret of eternal youth. Having just turned 95, Warren seems as vital as ever. I’ve known him for about 30 years and he hardly seems to have changed. He’s still painting and drawing, still driving, still alert and articulate. He’s one of those […]
Ink Remix & Mikhael Subotzky
Friday, April 22nd, 2016 Art Column,Mention Chinese art and most people think of brush-and-ink painting, a medium that has been around for at least 2,000 years. The image that springs to mind is of a craggy mountain with a sprinkling of equally contorted trees. The scene may be wreathed in mist, with a tiny sage perched on a ledge. In […]
William Yaxley & Edwin Wilson
Thursday, April 14th, 2016 Art Column,This job entails constant requests to open exhibitions but most are politely declined. So it was rare for me, last week, to undertake openings on successive nights in two different parts of the country. The first was a survey by Edwin Wilson at that proudly unfashionable venue, the Royal Art Society, Lavender Bay. The second […]
Lloyd Rees
Thursday, March 17th, 2016 Art Column,This weekend sees the launch of the 20th Biennale of Sydney, the most high-profile event in the Australian art calendar. As usual I’ll devote two columns to this mega-exhibition, but in the meantime there is one very different show that has waited a little too long for attention. Lloyd Rees: Painting with Pencil 1930-36, at […]
Country & Western
Friday, November 13th, 2015 Art Column,As Country & Western: landscape re-imagined tours Australia, it will leave a trail of disappointed music fans. The title seems to promise some mystical conjunction of landscape painting and Slim Dusty. In reality it’s all landscape. At the S.H.Ervin Gallery there is not even the sound of a guitar twanging in the background. It makes […]