Australian Art
Peter Godwin
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 Australian Art, International Art,In a 1990 article in the New Yorker, Dan Hofstadter described the School of London artists – notably R.B.Kitaj, Leon Kossoff and Dennis Creffield, as “dungeon masters”.[i] An accomplished exercise in cultural anthropology, this piece helped introduce American audiences to an eccentric tribe of painters that seemed to revel in dinginess and squalor. These artists […]
Fairweather
Sunday, March 1st, 2009 Australian Art, Book Reviews,FAIRWEATHER By Murray Bail At what point does a revised edition become a different book? Novelist Murray Bail published the first version of this monograph on Ian Fairweather in 1981. It became an instant classic, partly due to the extraordinary nature of the artist’s life, partly because of Bail’s engaging prose – so very different […]
Emily Kame Kngwarreye in Osaka
Friday, February 1st, 2008 Australian Art,“Why is it,” asks Margo Neale, “that they call Emily the impossible modernist?’” The term assumes that an elderly Aboriginal woman who spent virtually her entire life in the central desert region, had no chance of becoming acquainted with the great icons of modern art. The underlying idea is that modernism was the invention of […]
Bernard Ollis
Thursday, August 31st, 2006 Australian Art, General Art Essays,Bernard Ollis is one of those painters who elude easy categorization. This is at best a mixed blessing, because art historians love to be able to define an artist as an expressionist, a realist, a surrealist, or some plausible combination. Ollis is a little of each, but ultimately none of the above. He is a […]
Michael Bell: Yeeros & Civilisation
Tuesday, July 1st, 2003 Australian Art,It hardly seems fair that after twenty years of unceasing creativity, the name “Michael Bell” is largely identified with a single motif – a comic face with staring eyes, clenched teeth and three-day growth, AKA. the Sandman. The face became famous when it was picked up by 2JJJ as a logo for Steve Abbott’s deadpan […]
Cressida Campbell: A Profile
Tuesday, April 29th, 2003 Australian Art,Cressida Campbell would be the first to admit that most artists’ lives are uneventful. Allowing for those famous few who lopped off an ear or succumbed to Bohemian dissipation, there is little more to it than the daily grind of work in the studio, the repeated struggle for inspiration and motivation. This is Campbell’s lot, […]
Pride and Passion – Photographic Portraits of Fairfield by Danny Huynh
Monday, March 19th, 2001 Australian Art,Multiculturalism isn’t folk dancing, it’s the stoning of adulterers. Anthony Daniels. ‘Multiculturalism’ is one of the most contested terms in our modern liberal democracy. For some commentators it represents a sentimental dream of folk dances, national costumes and ethnic cuisine. Others see it as a mask for religious extremism and intolerance, age-old vendettas, and barbaric […]