Category Archive: ART
Caspar David Friedrich
(1774-1840) The strictly religious Pomeranian created some of the greatest landscapes of land and mind, leaving, not a fashionable school of design, but a romantic legacy that has moved later generations, including (alas) modern artists who were unable to draw. His bleak world-view is encapsulated in his paintings, and some of the scenes of desolation and ruin are oddly prescient. He at times recalls Poussin, Lorrain, Corot, even Constable, but he adds true Germanic gloom, revealing and half concealing a world whilst giving the viewer the impression of being beyond it. He made landscape, as painter David d’Angers observed, a…
Continue Reading →99 MINUTES
Vincent Namatjira, the great-grandson of the great Albert Namatjira, has won the Archibald Prize for portraiture, in this case of himself and former football champion of the Sydney Swans, Adam Goodes. Commenting on this award being the first to an indigenous artist, Mr. Namatjira commented: “It only took 99 years!” Now, while Goodes was a very, very good player, his reviews as a person are mixed: some claim he is a martyr to structural racism in this country and a brave flag-bearer for the aboriginal peoples. Others see him as a serial sook. It is neither our desire nor our…
Continue Reading →Salvador Dali – In Search of Immortality
(Directed by David Pujol) (2018) Mercury Cinema, Adelaide, 17 February 2020 As Dalí maintained, he was surrealism. It was probably his only constant in life. He was born 11 May 1904 in the Catalonian town of Figueres, named (‘reincarnated’) after a brother who had died a year before, aged two, doted on by his mother (who died when he was 16: “the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her… I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.”) His father was…
Continue Reading →The Art of Stalking
The New South Wales Police Force offers this regarding the crime of Stalking: Stalking is a crime…and…includes: ‘the following of a person about or the watching or frequenting of the vicinity of, or an approach to a person’s place of residence, business or work or any place that a person frequents for the purposes of any social or leisure activity’. Stalking involves a persistent course of conduct or actions by a person which are intended to maintain contact with or exercise power and control over another person. These actions cause distress, loss of control, fear or harassment to another person and occur…
Continue Reading →Tasmanian Art Gallery
November 2019 If you’re still reeling from the inanities of MONA, why not check out Hobart’s more staid collection, on Davey Street (but enter on the landward side), a stone’s throw from the docks? The Gallery combines artistic works with natural history pieces of local significance: For instance the famous Thylacine, a carnivorous marsupial otherwise known as the Tasmanian Tiger, due to the stripes along its coat. Although last seen alive in 1933, we like to think the wily animal exists and flourishes somewhere in the wild western half of the island (there have been some unverified sightings in recent years)….
Continue Reading →