Tag Archive: Painting
Nicola Kemp
We learned of fledgling artist, Nicola Kemp, from an article by Liz Walsh in the 31/3/16 Adelaide “Advertiser.” The following autobiographical detail is drawn or quoted from material kindly supplied by Nicola’s mother, Naomi Blacker. Nicola was born in 1999 in Port Lincoln, South Australia, the younger of two girls. She was diagnosed as dyslexic when she was ten. Nicola and her family regard her struggle with that difficulty as a substantial contributing factor to her artistic success. “The constant battle with school and the soul-destroying constant of failure is what drove Nicola to find her passion and devote hours to it at a young age. In her case it was the twin topics…
Continue Reading →Mum for Mistress
Whistler said of his mother’s visit: “All of a sudden in the middle of the affair my mother [Anna] arrived from the United States! General upheaval!….I had to empty my house and purify it from cellar to attic…”* Looking at the picture, perhaps we can understand the artist’s anxiety about this model of rectitude. Incidentally, she made Whistler promise to never paint on a Sunday. The wonderful Musée d’Orsay has lent Whistler’s famous Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 to the National Gallery of Victoria, as it is staging an exhibition of Pierre Bonnard (1867 – 1947) and despite its…
Continue Reading →Andrei Rublev
(Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky) (1966) The great painter of iconography in medieval Russia is given a splendid, challenging (and long) tribute in this startling chain of magnificently filmed events, the mud and the blood and the tears, the acts of ruin and of creation making a kind of gritty surrealism over seven loosely connected episodes, the kind of picture Dostoevsky might make. Patience is repaid with interest.
Continue Reading →The Windsor Hotel
At 111 Spring Street, opposite Parliament House, a tall man in purple has been welcoming guests to The Windsor for a very long time. The Windsor is TVC‘s hotel of choice when in Melbourne and indeed we are such regulars that both we and our close relative D were once upgraded to suites and we always receive a handwritten letter of welcome from the CEO when we check in. This is a grand eminence of red carpet, federation tiles, chintz curtains and afternoon tea. There is no day spa but there is the Cricketers’ Bar, with deep window embrasures and…
Continue Reading →National Gallery of Victoria
December 2014 TVC wandered mainly in the European wing this trip but the floating wooden Japanese village by Takahiro Iwasaki was a highlight, as were hardy perennials ‘The Garden of Love’ by Vivarini (1465-70), with its formal marble fountain bordered by trellised fruits (tomatoes? pomegranates? Triffids?); Jan Brueghel’s ‘Calvary’ (c. 1610) with its blue oils on copper and a harsh landscape with dogs and prurient audience watching the faith-man suffer; a little ‘St Jerome’ (c. 1540) peering into the blue distance in which birds wheel like bomber-planes; Poussin’s ‘The Crossing of the Red Sea’ (1632-4) and its choppy sea and…
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