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skyringI'm nursing a cut finger from a bit of home handyman work yesterday. We've recently acquired a skillet and I got tired of it hanging around the stove top, so I decided to stick a couple of hooks up inside the range hood to hang it and the wok on. The wok has been living in the laundry for the past five years - nearby, but not ready to hand, and I figured that this was one way of keeping it convenient. I love my wok - it's nicely seasoned and we use it at least once a week. Great for stir fry, good for frying onions, not so hot for frying eggs.
Anyway, the roof of the range hood was a pretty solid wood and instead of getting out the drill to make a starter hole for the screw-in cup hooks, I pulled out my trusty Cybertool, flipped out the awl and rammed it in to make a bit of a hole for the thread to bite into. Cramped quarters up inside the range hood - I was squeezed and bent awkwardly and my hand slipped as I pressed hard and I sliced into my right longman finger, just where the barrel of a pen rests when I write.
You know that rhyme?
Thumby
Wisby
Longman
Cherrytree
Little Jack-a-dandy
Heaven knows where it comes from, part of the nonsense that you learn as children and forget until you have your own.
We meant to visit the Art Gallery last week, and I even made release notes for a book. But as it happened, Kerri wasn't keen to spend another couple of hours on her feet atter seeing the Chinese Exhibition at the National Library.
One thing or another postponed it but today we made the trip over the bridge. Huge drifts of white tree seed, maybe from willows or poplars (or both), clumping together where the eddies of the wind gathered in the nooks and crannies of the angular exterior of the gallery. Every now and then a willy-willy would start up and swirl the white puffs upwards like summer snow curving around the sharp corners of the ungainly building.
Unlike the exquisitely proportioned National Library of Australia a few hundred metres away, the National Gallery is cubist, brutalist, grey concrete and slab sides, angles and cutouts jarring and distorting any perception of the real shape. From one approach it is a monstrous craggy cliff of a building towering up into the clear Canberra sky, from another it is low, part of the landscape, the fog of the sculpture garden blending and bonding it to the landscape.
It is a concrete statement of Art, a building that people love or hate but cannot feel indifferent towards. I contrast it with the Parthenon-like perfection of the library building and wish that the art gallery were a mirror echoing the graceful form across Walter Burley Griffin's land axis. It would be a fitting symetry of form, an echoing statement visible from the distant heights of Mount Ainslie, or Parliament House at the triangle's apex. It would be fit, elegant and perfect.
And yet, when I circle up close, wind my way to the entrance, push through the revolving doors and lose myself inside the twisting jumble of halls and corridors, ramps and lofty ceilings, I think to myself that Art is not some predictable, mathematical formulaic discipline. It is wild and exuberant - challenging, emotional, changing with the mood of the painter, the observer, the fashion of society. Art is something that takes you by surprise and makes you feel things you didn't mean to, and think thoughts that were not anticipated when you got out of bed in the morning.
Art is Gandalf rapping on the door of Bilbo Baggins's comfortable life to send him stumbling out into the wide world, down bewildering byways into an adventure. And Lord knows I need shaking out of my comfort zone every now and again.
So I expect the unexpected from such a building, and I'm not disappointed. Every visit is a pleasant blend of old, familiar friends and new meetings. There is always a freebie themed exhibition on, as well as the grand sponsored travelling exhibitions we get from time to time. The permanent collection is rearranged and rotated - so long as you don't return on a daily basis, you are assured of something new from your visit.
Of course, for the first time visitor to the gallery, it's all a little overwhelming. Thankfully there are comfortable black leather couches to fall into if the shock of seeing Jackson Pollack's Blue Poles for the first time is too much. This bold reach of pure abstraction, the archetypical broad canvas of Modern Art was almost too much for Australia when it was bought in 1973. "We paid a million dollars for that piece of foreign crap?" was the almost universal thought of the average bloke in the street. The reforming Whitlam government of the day was happy to associate itself with this purchase. We paid what was then the record price for a piece by any Twentieth Century artist, including the long adored masters of our own Heidelberg School, and we gave it pride of place in the national collection.
If nothing else, this got ordinary Australians talking and thinking about Art. The debate expanded to encompass Art and Government, Art and Politics, Art and Economy, Art and National Identity and in the hurly-burly of anguished letters to the editor, dogmatic radio talkback and thoughtful opinion pieces, one clear winner emerged, and that was the concept that Australians were worthy players on the international scene in fields outside of sports and the occasional war.
As a matter of fact, the purchase made sound economic sense. It is hard to value such items, but there is no doubt now that with the growing recognition of Jackson Pollack as a giant figure in the modern artistic landscape, the painting is worth many times what we paid for it. In thirty years, it is grown in value ten or twenty times over.
And as a result of the debates of decades ago, it is a national icon, every bit as much as the impressionists of the Federation years produced such recognised representations of Australiana as The Shearing of the Rams or The Purple Noon's Transparent Might or On the Wallaby Track.
Of course, the State Galleries, including the confusingly named National Gallery of Victoria - Victorians claim they named their gallery before Federation and they don't intend to change it for any newcomers - have the lion's share of the great old works of national art, but a few of the best are on display here in Canberra. When it comes to Australian icons, they don't get much more iconic than Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series of paintings.
There is a gallery devoted to Australian art of the colonial period, and though the paintings by Eugen von Guerard and John Glover are magnificent landscapes, they are too alien, too European for my taste. They are the result of European eyes, European styles, European colours trying and largely failing to capture the essence of Australia. The trees are wrong, the landscapes too green and settled, the animals are the wrong shape, and the people are either too finely dressed or not at all in the case of the Aborigines. It is England set down in a new world, and it doesn't quite work for me.
In my mind, Australian art begins to take shape around 1890, decades after the gold rushes had brought in floods of immigrants, my own ancestors among them, and the largely unsuccessful goldminers turned their hands to making this strange new land their home. As the six colonies thought seriously about becoming a nation, so too did new schools of art and literature emerge to help shape a uniquely Australian identity. Along with Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, the period is marked by the emergence of Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and others.
The golden summers of Heidelberg - an outer Melbourne suburb, not the university city in Germany - dominate a room or two of the Canberra gallery, and it is pleasant to linger here. It was a time of nation-building, of optimism, of a parallel development of a uniquely Australian style in Art, society, and identity. Whelan on the Log epitomises the way in which the settlers cleared the bush and built houses for themselves. Beside it hangs a similar work by Charles Conder - same log, same tree, same harsh sunlight and rich gold of the freshly cut wood. In fact I suspect they shared the same paintbox. Not the first nor the last time a pair of great painters camped together and produced parallel works - Conder and Tom Roberts painted versions of the same scene at Sydeny's Coogee Beach.
Arthur Streeton, who chose to paint Whelan straddling the log, one leg grotesquely foreshortened, is another of my favorites. His landscapes are vast, his feeling for the land true and honest, and his attention to detail and colour is overwhelming. I feel that I am looking out of a window, or that if I took a fast enough run, I could burst into his wide countrysides. They overwhelm me.
And yet it is his smaller works that I love most. His jewel-like watercolours are splashes of bright colour, artfully arranged, and they see the light of day all too rarely. The great oil paintings are on permanent display, but like all works on paper, his watercolours are usually stored away in the dark lest they fade beyond the reach of generations yet unborn. Today a few have been brought out, and I fall upon them in a silent rapture, moving only when a line of schoolchildren clutching folding stools file into the room and set up a semi-circle before a guide.
In the room outside hangs a personal favorite: Madge, a full-length portrait of a young woman by a young Australian painter of the Federation period, Hugh Ramsay. There was something in her expression that caught me, and when I learnt more about the painter, I understood what it was. Hugh, like so many Australian artists of the time, went to Europe to develop his skills and exhibit his talents. Art was firmly centred in the great capitals of Western Europe, and if you didn't spend a few years in Paris, you had no reputation at all. It was in Europe that he caught tuberculosis, and he returned to Australia to recover his health. Here he painted his final and perhaps greatest paintings, using his sisters as models. The expression on Madge's face is one of love and concern, as she struggles with conflicting needs. On the one hand she wants him to rest and recover. He is young, as she is, and there is a brilliant career and a long life ahead of him, if only he would take care of himself. On the other hand, she knows that he is consumed by his love of Art, and it is Art that gives him strength and vitality. So she stands, a willing but reluctant model for her dying brother in a makeshift studio, canvases piled against a wall behind her, a vase of flowers bringing in the freshness of the outside world, and the flush of her cheeks lighting up a quiet gallery a century later.
Ramsay's other works are almost equally impressive. Portraits, mainly, there is a marked similarity with the contemporary style of John Singer Sargent, notably some gorgeous white on white work. I once was lucky enough to see an exhibition of almost all of Ramsay's works in a single long room of Victoria's Ian Potter Gallery, and it was one of the few occasions when I returned to a gallery within a month, making the long boring drive down to Melbourne with my wife to see the display again.
Moving on past the impressionists, abstraction and the distortions of modern art begin to make their appearance. Perhaps it is this exciting period, between Golden Summer and Blue Poles, that attracts me the most. There are two World Wars and a Great Depression as the infant nation of Australia grows and develops and its artists turn inward to move beyond the landscapes to people and society and how they live and work in an increasingly urbanised land. The Sydney Harbour Bridge is a symbol of progress, the two halves of the arch inching towards each other, while out in the suburbs, the arid streetscapes and stick figures of Drysdale show Australians at home in a land that must seem utterly repugnant to the gentler residents of greener nations.
New paintings, new techniques and while there is a slide away from even the semi-abstract, the works of John Brack and Jeffrey Smart are iconic enough, the last gasp of the pre Pollack world.
We browse briefly through the shop and then we are out again, leaving behind a book that's not about art but is entirely appropriate.
Anyway, the roof of the range hood was a pretty solid wood and instead of getting out the drill to make a starter hole for the screw-in cup hooks, I pulled out my trusty Cybertool, flipped out the awl and rammed it in to make a bit of a hole for the thread to bite into. Cramped quarters up inside the range hood - I was squeezed and bent awkwardly and my hand slipped as I pressed hard and I sliced into my right longman finger, just where the barrel of a pen rests when I write.
You know that rhyme?
Thumby
Wisby
Longman
Cherrytree
Little Jack-a-dandy
Heaven knows where it comes from, part of the nonsense that you learn as children and forget until you have your own.
We meant to visit the Art Gallery last week, and I even made release notes for a book. But as it happened, Kerri wasn't keen to spend another couple of hours on her feet atter seeing the Chinese Exhibition at the National Library.
One thing or another postponed it but today we made the trip over the bridge. Huge drifts of white tree seed, maybe from willows or poplars (or both), clumping together where the eddies of the wind gathered in the nooks and crannies of the angular exterior of the gallery. Every now and then a willy-willy would start up and swirl the white puffs upwards like summer snow curving around the sharp corners of the ungainly building.
Unlike the exquisitely proportioned National Library of Australia a few hundred metres away, the National Gallery is cubist, brutalist, grey concrete and slab sides, angles and cutouts jarring and distorting any perception of the real shape. From one approach it is a monstrous craggy cliff of a building towering up into the clear Canberra sky, from another it is low, part of the landscape, the fog of the sculpture garden blending and bonding it to the landscape.
It is a concrete statement of Art, a building that people love or hate but cannot feel indifferent towards. I contrast it with the Parthenon-like perfection of the library building and wish that the art gallery were a mirror echoing the graceful form across Walter Burley Griffin's land axis. It would be a fitting symetry of form, an echoing statement visible from the distant heights of Mount Ainslie, or Parliament House at the triangle's apex. It would be fit, elegant and perfect.
And yet, when I circle up close, wind my way to the entrance, push through the revolving doors and lose myself inside the twisting jumble of halls and corridors, ramps and lofty ceilings, I think to myself that Art is not some predictable, mathematical formulaic discipline. It is wild and exuberant - challenging, emotional, changing with the mood of the painter, the observer, the fashion of society. Art is something that takes you by surprise and makes you feel things you didn't mean to, and think thoughts that were not anticipated when you got out of bed in the morning.
Art is Gandalf rapping on the door of Bilbo Baggins's comfortable life to send him stumbling out into the wide world, down bewildering byways into an adventure. And Lord knows I need shaking out of my comfort zone every now and again.
So I expect the unexpected from such a building, and I'm not disappointed. Every visit is a pleasant blend of old, familiar friends and new meetings. There is always a freebie themed exhibition on, as well as the grand sponsored travelling exhibitions we get from time to time. The permanent collection is rearranged and rotated - so long as you don't return on a daily basis, you are assured of something new from your visit.
Of course, for the first time visitor to the gallery, it's all a little overwhelming. Thankfully there are comfortable black leather couches to fall into if the shock of seeing Jackson Pollack's Blue Poles for the first time is too much. This bold reach of pure abstraction, the archetypical broad canvas of Modern Art was almost too much for Australia when it was bought in 1973. "We paid a million dollars for that piece of foreign crap?" was the almost universal thought of the average bloke in the street. The reforming Whitlam government of the day was happy to associate itself with this purchase. We paid what was then the record price for a piece by any Twentieth Century artist, including the long adored masters of our own Heidelberg School, and we gave it pride of place in the national collection.
If nothing else, this got ordinary Australians talking and thinking about Art. The debate expanded to encompass Art and Government, Art and Politics, Art and Economy, Art and National Identity and in the hurly-burly of anguished letters to the editor, dogmatic radio talkback and thoughtful opinion pieces, one clear winner emerged, and that was the concept that Australians were worthy players on the international scene in fields outside of sports and the occasional war.
As a matter of fact, the purchase made sound economic sense. It is hard to value such items, but there is no doubt now that with the growing recognition of Jackson Pollack as a giant figure in the modern artistic landscape, the painting is worth many times what we paid for it. In thirty years, it is grown in value ten or twenty times over.
And as a result of the debates of decades ago, it is a national icon, every bit as much as the impressionists of the Federation years produced such recognised representations of Australiana as The Shearing of the Rams or The Purple Noon's Transparent Might or On the Wallaby Track.
Of course, the State Galleries, including the confusingly named National Gallery of Victoria - Victorians claim they named their gallery before Federation and they don't intend to change it for any newcomers - have the lion's share of the great old works of national art, but a few of the best are on display here in Canberra. When it comes to Australian icons, they don't get much more iconic than Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series of paintings.
There is a gallery devoted to Australian art of the colonial period, and though the paintings by Eugen von Guerard and John Glover are magnificent landscapes, they are too alien, too European for my taste. They are the result of European eyes, European styles, European colours trying and largely failing to capture the essence of Australia. The trees are wrong, the landscapes too green and settled, the animals are the wrong shape, and the people are either too finely dressed or not at all in the case of the Aborigines. It is England set down in a new world, and it doesn't quite work for me.
In my mind, Australian art begins to take shape around 1890, decades after the gold rushes had brought in floods of immigrants, my own ancestors among them, and the largely unsuccessful goldminers turned their hands to making this strange new land their home. As the six colonies thought seriously about becoming a nation, so too did new schools of art and literature emerge to help shape a uniquely Australian identity. Along with Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, the period is marked by the emergence of Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and others.
The golden summers of Heidelberg - an outer Melbourne suburb, not the university city in Germany - dominate a room or two of the Canberra gallery, and it is pleasant to linger here. It was a time of nation-building, of optimism, of a parallel development of a uniquely Australian style in Art, society, and identity. Whelan on the Log epitomises the way in which the settlers cleared the bush and built houses for themselves. Beside it hangs a similar work by Charles Conder - same log, same tree, same harsh sunlight and rich gold of the freshly cut wood. In fact I suspect they shared the same paintbox. Not the first nor the last time a pair of great painters camped together and produced parallel works - Conder and Tom Roberts painted versions of the same scene at Sydeny's Coogee Beach.
Arthur Streeton, who chose to paint Whelan straddling the log, one leg grotesquely foreshortened, is another of my favorites. His landscapes are vast, his feeling for the land true and honest, and his attention to detail and colour is overwhelming. I feel that I am looking out of a window, or that if I took a fast enough run, I could burst into his wide countrysides. They overwhelm me.
And yet it is his smaller works that I love most. His jewel-like watercolours are splashes of bright colour, artfully arranged, and they see the light of day all too rarely. The great oil paintings are on permanent display, but like all works on paper, his watercolours are usually stored away in the dark lest they fade beyond the reach of generations yet unborn. Today a few have been brought out, and I fall upon them in a silent rapture, moving only when a line of schoolchildren clutching folding stools file into the room and set up a semi-circle before a guide.
In the room outside hangs a personal favorite: Madge, a full-length portrait of a young woman by a young Australian painter of the Federation period, Hugh Ramsay. There was something in her expression that caught me, and when I learnt more about the painter, I understood what it was. Hugh, like so many Australian artists of the time, went to Europe to develop his skills and exhibit his talents. Art was firmly centred in the great capitals of Western Europe, and if you didn't spend a few years in Paris, you had no reputation at all. It was in Europe that he caught tuberculosis, and he returned to Australia to recover his health. Here he painted his final and perhaps greatest paintings, using his sisters as models. The expression on Madge's face is one of love and concern, as she struggles with conflicting needs. On the one hand she wants him to rest and recover. He is young, as she is, and there is a brilliant career and a long life ahead of him, if only he would take care of himself. On the other hand, she knows that he is consumed by his love of Art, and it is Art that gives him strength and vitality. So she stands, a willing but reluctant model for her dying brother in a makeshift studio, canvases piled against a wall behind her, a vase of flowers bringing in the freshness of the outside world, and the flush of her cheeks lighting up a quiet gallery a century later.
Ramsay's other works are almost equally impressive. Portraits, mainly, there is a marked similarity with the contemporary style of John Singer Sargent, notably some gorgeous white on white work. I once was lucky enough to see an exhibition of almost all of Ramsay's works in a single long room of Victoria's Ian Potter Gallery, and it was one of the few occasions when I returned to a gallery within a month, making the long boring drive down to Melbourne with my wife to see the display again.
Moving on past the impressionists, abstraction and the distortions of modern art begin to make their appearance. Perhaps it is this exciting period, between Golden Summer and Blue Poles, that attracts me the most. There are two World Wars and a Great Depression as the infant nation of Australia grows and develops and its artists turn inward to move beyond the landscapes to people and society and how they live and work in an increasingly urbanised land. The Sydney Harbour Bridge is a symbol of progress, the two halves of the arch inching towards each other, while out in the suburbs, the arid streetscapes and stick figures of Drysdale show Australians at home in a land that must seem utterly repugnant to the gentler residents of greener nations.
New paintings, new techniques and while there is a slide away from even the semi-abstract, the works of John Brack and Jeffrey Smart are iconic enough, the last gasp of the pre Pollack world.
We browse briefly through the shop and then we are out again, leaving behind a book that's not about art but is entirely appropriate.
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-19 07:43 am (UTC)I also haven't had coffee yet, so blame that.