Eastern Suburbs Art Group

This show  of sculptures encompasses works by people from Asia Pacific. A lot of the artists are from Melbourne and the work is not all excllent. I have picked out a few good examples of work. Bonita Bub's 'Painting Carriers' (above) contains I learned works from the gallery's collection. The curator on the floor said that she had actually never seen the works in the racks on display. Which points to the reason I liked this work, it tells a truth. That most art in the world is never shown it just sits in storage. Nearby Qunxiao Qu's 'Wig Shoes' sat on the floor like contestants in a celebrity dancing show, but without a partner. See above. The shoes were near another work by the same artist, a short piece of text written in neon light.  Alicia Francovich's 'Techno botanics' took up part of a wall (see above). While other works occupied space in the gallery itself, for example Bub's work or Qu's shoes, Francovich's work is wholly 2D. T...

 I went to Wollongong hoping to visit the gallery but found too late it opens at midday, so popped into this gallery near Sutherland instead. The show is about noisy celebration, but the gallery was remarkably quiet. The works are dynamic however. I thought of insects for some reason. These sculptuires are fun, though sculpture is quite rare in commercial galleries. Hazelhurst is not commercial but these works are all for sale. You would need some sort of large courtyard to properly show them off. The works are certainly exuberant. They seem to give off sound, like malformed tuning forks. I had some lunch in the gallery cafe as well, which was nice after the long drive.

I took the show down this week, it had been up for about 10 days. I sat the gallery probably for half that time but I am not counting. The show created different reacions in different people, but the Tree Veneration Society tapestry was the drawcard. It's on the right hand wall in the photo. Made by visitors to Rising Tide in November, the tapestry was a collective effort. As one person noted however the poems displayed across the room were more personal. The contrast between the two was interesting, she said. You can see the sonnets pasted to the wall opposite the tapestry in the above photo. I also included collages from 2022 or thereabouts, I don't remember all the details of each individual painting I don't have time. Cars feature in Road Trips, and the show preamble (also pasted to the wall) talked about how even though the road is always there it feels when you are driving between cities that somehow you are creating the road. A paradox perhaps but I don't ask too...

Yesterday I spent a few hours sitting this show in the Civic Hall. Two of us on the front desk. Some items sold, lots of good conversations. In total I had 7 items in the show. It was my first show of this kind so a learning experience. One of my oils in the nabove photo (bottom left). The order of the hang was eclectic to say the least, there didn't seem to be any logic to it, but the nquality of the art was often very good. Two watercolours (above right bottom) of mine. All of the works of mine in the show were plein air studies done in Victoria. The trips were in January and February.  The show ends Sunday.

It was a decent turn out. For me it was supporting a colleague from Tree Veneration Society. But behind the nice words, the careful epithets, the studied agreement with ideas artworks always try to embody, there was a stubborn fact in that some of Watanabe's works have perishable components. Other aspects of Watanabe's work struggle in this sort of environment, but the backlit items are simply going to fail one day. I wonder what is the point. Maybe late last year I discussed this aspect of some contemporary work with another practitioner. At that time the solution didn't present itself. With Watanabe's work it's a sort of category error that fights against the lightness of the design, the execution. But of course not all the works contain electric lights, which the gallery had carefully wired up in straight lines and with polity 90-degree curves. The framed works (see above) are also carefully finished, These frames being specially constructed again with curves. Th...

We hear a lot of stories about laneways in Melbourne. Some are covered (like this one). Some are nice, some are dirty. In Sydney laneways like these wre digested by the amalgamation of titles after WWII when the vast number of skyscrapers went up. An era of cheap oil, huge capitall influxes, and a burgeoning professional class trained in increasing number of tertiary education institutions. Of course this is not art with a capital "A" approved by the culture industry, it is commerical. But it is very strange and so I took a series of photos. The TV screen in the back diplaying I think fashion promotion images were especially intriguing. Not possible to say if the display is still there, these photos were taken some months ago. Maybe if someone goes to the city centre they can report back with news. Very strange sort of weitd cartoon character. Possibly frightening for some, even adults.

 In Melbourne recently I saw this social media ad and considered the idea too strange, especially for Sydney, where I live. In the end the experience was a bit disappointing but just the train trip was worthwhile. The displays were often interesting but not really what was promised. The museum is in a small street off a main drag. What impressed me about Collingwood is the lack of eateries. The suburb is relatively close to the city centre but I didn't even see a hamburger shop, though there was a kind of pub or hotel. Perhaps it was a bar. In contrast the city centre in Melbourne is crowded with restaurants and places to buy food, ice cream parlours and the like. What this means is anyone's guess, however it is clear that if you live in Collingwood and you want a kebab you have to go into town.

 When I waas down in Melbourne in January I saw this show, which sort of bookends the 'Dangerously Modern' show in Sydney at the same time. One show specifically about women photographers, but with a global perspective. The other show about women in Europe in the 1st Half of last century.  Writing about the Sydney show I said it was comprehensive, actually it was enormous. The guard knew how many works were on the walls. Aat the NGV I tried the same trick but the guard was not able to tell me. At the NGV there were many different subjects, as they were in the Sydney show. The photographs were sometimes portraits, urban landscapes, photos of children. A range of different things. The diversity of subjects was proof of the intensity with which the artists worked. And they were aware they were making art. The NGV show is still running if you want to see the works. When I was there it was sunny and warm and I stopped at a food van outside to get lunch. There was a fashion show on ...

These wall sculptures are evocative of space, they sort of create space but of course they are just sitting on a wall so they also do not. But the intent is there I think. At least this is what seemed to me to be going on. At one point in our discussion the artist referred furthermore (Ihadn't mentioned anything rleated at the time) to negative space. Mainly when I think of this phrase I think of a particular Romantic poet whose intent has never been fully understood even by most of the Elites. Also in this regard I think of Chinese painting, and because Pollard's work is mainly black (and since the gallery walls - most interior walls actually, these days - are white) my mind raced to pictures in ink of, say, carp or perhaps a wren on a slung branch. One day I will be in a position to revisit this misunderstood phrase alongside the artist, we both belong to the Tree Veneration Society. In the gallery I stayed talking for a while, probably most of an hour. THis is a good way to ...

 These luminous organic abstract works play with colour and texture. Colleen says the impasto ground goes on first, making shapes of texture suggestive of geological formations. Bright red or vivid green the canvases string colour along a wall. They are like Christmas decorations, unchallenging and intuitively interesting. I haven't worked out what it is about colour, but it is central to who we are. Humans live in a wold of colour, we use colour to communicate, to survive. Frances uses colour to entertain and this is perhaps the most rewarding use of colour there is.

Organised or at least publicised through a community art society I belong to, this show was only up for a few days. I dropped off the work on Thursday and the main event was the Friday, then I picked up the work on the Saturday. There was a talk in the church about Van Gogh's religiosity (his father was a Protestant pastor) which was very interesting because most of contemporary commentary on such painters is rigidly secular. The truth is that Van Gogh was alive 150 years ago. It's so amusing how we can easily give credence to the outdated ideas of Marx and Engels but willfully ignore the completely comprehensible ideas of people living even later than them. It only takes a few seconds to see the reason in this view. Marx was publishing in the 1850s and Van Gogh was painting in the 1880s but somehow Marx is more contemporary than Van Gogh. The absurdity is astonishing. But unfortunately this is the commonplace we worship these days. I was incredibly lucky to bump into two frien...

Being in the southern capital for a week I made time to see this show. Attendance was hardly exceptional, I queued up at morning with the doors opening. Not surprisingly I fixed on the colour, such as (below) Lydia Wegner. I also really liked (below) Cassandra bird's work. Again colour features strongly in these works. Alex Walker's (below) photoprints also strongly use colour. The out of focus really drew my eyes. From New Zealand Christian Dimick (below) reminded me of a Sydney artist and I mentioned this to the gallery staffer on the booth. We chatted for a minute or two. First nations artist Janet Koongotema (below) offered some more strong colour. Keturah Zimran is another First nations artist (below) and she uses the famous Basquiat crown in her compositions, which have a sort of pop sensibility which I liked. Once again coilour is strong. Another artist I liked was Henry Lewis (below) who sort of uses the same patch effect as me in my paramontages, or at least some of th...

An impressive show with over 200 works, so curators have basically hoovered up a majority perhaps of what is available in this category of art made in Europe by women at end of 19th and beginning of 20th centuries. These works are of high quality and there are some names I never learned before, which is a testament to how necessary this show is. I was struck by the variety of subject matter, though the Impresionists in the 1870s and around that time had also focused on domesitc scenes, for examples paintings of children. In the 'Dangerously Modern' show this necessary preoccupation is repeated. But there are other more traditionally masculine themes such as the nude or war, for example the painting (above) by Iso Rae, whose name I had not know previously. She was born in 1860 the label tells me, in Melbourne. A very improtant show; I thought the curators did a great job putting together such a large number of works from so many painters in this class.

This was my second solo show this year. We had a nice number of very friendly people including Edmund Thommen who did me the favour of taking some photos (see below). Christopher Michaels who also came on the day made a remark about the work to my left in the above photo. The work is Polyp 2, and contains a poem. I have known Christopher for years and we sometimes discuss philosophy, which I never read. So on the opening day he said something like You don't like philosophy but this poem sounds like it. Maybe it is time to write more. There were three series of works, all started since November last year when I was in Newcastle for the Rising Tide event. The polyp works (only one in this show due to size) use collage cutouts scanned and placed using software. I made the entire series of works only using two shapes.  There was also the ambiguity series which are photos with words layered over them, in fact the subject lines of the sorts of emails that men often get from (apparently) ...

This show at Hazlehurst Art Centre in Gymea. The opening was last week. I am in this show with a photomontage of photos taken during a road trip in 2008. Penny Simons held the talk (above photo) and a fairly good crowd attended on the day. It was a fun event and i found I was talking people through the work I made for the show, not once but several times. This an interesting exercise because I hadn't really discussed the work with anyone prior to the event. The Tree Veneration Society is mainly comprised of artists. The goal of the organisation is to celebrate trees, to go with the name. The range of works on display was quite surprising, even to me who had spent the month prior organising social media content for the show. I got to meet some people in the group I nhad not spoken to before, which was appealing. The show runs til next week.

I partly went to Melbourne to see this show and it did not disappoint. I was not really prepared for the contents of the show however, much of which is pretty boring stuff like silver ingots. I mean if you've seen one ingot you've seem them all, they are sort of like steel fingers in shape and size. Above photo shows some of the ingots, there is a ton of them. All nearly identical. But there are other items as well, including crafed containers. See photo below. This containers had in it a whole ot of other things, some glass some metal.  Each item was wrapped in cloth. I mean each item in the above container. Although most of the cloth had disintegrated as the container was like 1000 years old or something. But traces of cloth remained. Galloway is on the Ireland side of southwest Scotland, though the name actually sounds Irish. But it's not. The museum has a crafted sign showing silver trade routes, which was sort of cool. But not a whole ton of information.  There were ot...

The turnoff for the Foundation is large and has been especially constructed for the purpose of feeding traffic safely into the parking area, which is large. The gallery is located about three and a half hours' drive from Melbourne. NCEA has a spacious reception area that spills into a cafe. The tables are magenta and bottle green, which is very colourful and striking. The entry fee is small, or at least it was for the prize show I saw. The show didn’t really have a theme. A lot of the works in the prize exhibition are figurative, such as Jesse Wallace's 'Peekaboo' (above) which shows a fur seal, a species endemic to Australia. The show spaces are large and evidently suited not only to showing works but to accommodating events. I mean there is plenty of space for people to mingle and talk in comfort (see above photo). The facility is well organised and has a cafe as already mentioned, important when you have to go so far just to get to the gallery. The gallery is situate...

This little gallery is in a regional town about 3 hours' drive from Melboure. IT is a pretty part of the world and getting round Victoria is anyway pleasant becasue the landscape is so uniform. I apologise for not posting while away I just got back this morning, had a car wash to get the mud off the car, picked up mail, picked up framing, got some information from the art supply shop, and did other errands that needed doing. Gresham's tapestries are quite small but they are magnificent, full of colour and poise. For some reason they reminded me of banknotes, possibly the ndetail, which is astonishing. The gallery has several rooms but the Gresham show is nearest the front counter. The gallery does not sell works but staff can put you in touch with the artist if required.

The show was set up about a month ago and will come down next week. At the moment we are meeting people there by appointment only, so if you want to see the show please get in touch, I met friends there today and another man, whom I met at Rozelle Markets, also popped in briefly this morning. My friends have always been supportive of my practice. Each time at least they buy a book, one time a book of prose one time a book of poetry. At the markets I also sold paintings and a book each time. That is two weekends in a row. If anyone wants to see the Drummoyne show please get in touch and we can organise a time and date.