Tag: landscape
Not the Way Home, Damaged
Saturday, June 16th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, International Art,In recent years there has been a spate of projects in which a group of artists are taken to some far-flung location and invited to respond to a new environment. The end result is a group exhibition that gathers together works made on the spot, and those created afterwards in the studio from memories, sketches […]
Euan Macleod: The Shadow Line
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012 Art Essays, Australian Art, General Art Essays,Euan Macleod may be a landscape painter but it often seems as if the physical world is not his principle focus. Although he may stand for hours painting en plein air; although his pictures may reflect the recognisable features of a particular place, Macleod’s true subject is to be found within his own mind. The […]
Elisabeth Cummings
Saturday, January 21st, 2012 Art Column, Australian Art,A recent press release from the National Gallery of Australia announces an exhibition of 200 years of Australian landscape to be held at the Royal Academy, London, in September 2013. This is a long-overdue event, and it is to be hoped the NGA takes the opportunity to make the show something more than a historical […]
Fred Williams
Saturday, September 10th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,When the previous retrospective of an artist’s work contained no fewer than 417 pieces, it is inevitable that a new exhibition of about 120 pictures will be known as the ‘smaller’ show. That earlier Fred Williams’s mega-retrospective was held at the National Gallery of Australia in 1987, but I still have a vivid recollection of […]
Goodbye Margaret, hello Brisbane
Sunday, July 31st, 2011 Australian Art, Blog,There are a number of phone calls that I dread, although they are inevitable. One arrived last Wednesday when the SMH Arts Editor, Clare Morgan, rang to tell me that Margaret Olley had died. Margaret has been a fixture on the Australian art scene since the 1940s, and it would be difficult to think of […]
Eugene von Guérard
Saturday, July 23rd, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,In the entire history of Australian art, no painter has ever been through greater extremes of adulation and neglect than Eugene von Guérard (1811-1901). In the 1860s he was recognised as the finest landscapist in the colony, but by the 1870s his reputation was in decline. In the following century he was all but forgotten. […]
William Robinson
Saturday, May 14th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,Looking at this year’s dismal selection for the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW, I couldn’t help thinking that the most average landscape by William Robinson, who won the prize in 1990 and 1996, would have murdered everything else in the room.
Photography & Place & An Edwardian Summer
Saturday, April 2nd, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,In 1975 the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York, hosted the exhibition: New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. It is still talked about as one of the most influential shows of the modern era, with an index of its significance being that second-hand copies of the original catalogue now change hands for […]
Mary Tonkin
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011 Australian Art,At first glance Mary Tonkin’s new paintings make one think of the scorched and blackened residues after a bush fire has roared through a forest, but here appearances may be deceiving. The area of the Dandenongs where she has her studio on a family property has its share of scorched trees and undergrowth, but this […]