Tag: painting
Marion Borgelt & Paul Selwood
Saturday, September 17th, 2016 Art Column,Ever since mayor, Jeff McCloy, decided that Newcastle Art Gallery couldn’t afford a renovation and didn’t need a director, the place has been as lively as a wet weekend in Miami. This has been a disaster for one of Australia’s leading regional galleries. Perhaps only Ballarat and Bendigo could claim to have more important collections, […]
Salon des Refusés 2016
Friday, August 5th, 2016 Art Column,Émile Zola gave us a vivid, barely-fictionalised account of the first Salon des Refusés, in his novel, L’Oeuvre (AKA. The Masterpiece): “He could see the visitors’ mouths gaping, their eyes narrowing, from the moment they passed the door; across the room, a group of young people were staggering back against the archway as if someone […]
David Hockney
Thursday, August 4th, 2016 Blog,“Los Angeles is an acquired taste,” says David Hockney, although he admits he fell for the city on his very first visit in 1964. After growing up in Yorkshire, Hockney was excited by the “eroticism” of L.A. It was like nothing he’d seen or imagined. To a young, gay artist from Britain’s gloomy north it […]
Degas
Thursday, July 28th, 2016 Art Column,Degas had a dread of publicity and an intense dislike of journalists. “Those people trap you in your bed,” he grumbled, “strip off your shirt, corner you in the street, and when you complain, they say: ‘You belong to the public.’” Almost a hundred years after his death, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (1834-1917) has become public property […]
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 […]
Frida and Diego
Friday, July 22nd, 2016 Art Column,When 22-year-old Frida Kahlo married 42-year-old Diego Rivera in August 1929, her parents described it as the union of a dove and an elephant. This may have been a fair description of the newlyweds’ physical attributes, but Diego was also an elephant in terms of his public profile while Frida seemed as quiet as a […]
Archibald Prize 2016
Friday, July 15th, 2016 Art Column,For a severe case of cultural vertigo try spending three weeks in the museums of Europe gazing at portraits by Rembrandt, Rubens and Beckmann, before hurrying back to Sydney for… the Archibald Prize! If travel broadens the mind it’s a positive disadvantage when it comes to appreciating the charms of this great Australian institution. Faced […]
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 […]
Telling Tales
Friday, July 1st, 2016 Art Column,At the 1986 Adelaide Festival I attended a couple of evenings with American actor, Spalding Gray, who sat on a bare stage and delivered monologues. It sounds like a recipe for boredom but Gray’s performances were spell-binding – a revelation as to the power of simple, unadulterated story-telling. In tribal cultures the role of story-telling […]
Whistler's Mother
Friday, June 3rd, 2016 Art Column,In the recent Head On photo festival, one memorable picture showed a side-on view of a dominatrix in a shiny black jump suit sitting in a curved chair. On the grey wall behind the sitter was a framed photo of a muscle-man’s torso covered in leather straps. It was Whistler’s Mother for bondage fiends and […]