John McDonald

Last week I was reminded of the gulf that exists between the art world and the rest of the world, when ABC radio asked me to comment on the Mayor of Newcastle’s view that funding for a new regional gallery should come from selling works in the collection. His logic was: the holdings of the … More

Almost sixty years after his death, John Joseph Wardell Power is overdue for another look. Power is best known as the generous benefactor who provided funds for a department of art history at Sydney University and a collection that has since evolved into the Museum of Contemporary Art. It is not widely known that the … More

Ken Whisson says he has always enjoyed being “outside of the awful mainstream”, but it may be that he is about to redefine what is mainstream and what is marginal. Ken Whisson: As If at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is the most fascinating retrospective since the National Gallery of Australia’s George Lambert survey of … More

Fred Williams used to say that if you can’t paint a portrait then your art is in trouble. He would have been surprised to see so many portraits included in his recent retrospective, as they were only ever a diversion from his landscape paintings. For an artist there is always the danger that one day … More

In recent years there has been a spate of projects in which a group of artists are taken to some far-flung location and invited to respond to a new environment. The end result is a group exhibition that gathers together works made on the spot, and those created afterwards in the studio from memories, sketches … More

Among the unsolicited art emails that appear in my mail-box every week, one recent posting came from the Martos Gallery in New York, who were holding an exhibition called We Regret to Inform You There is Currently No Space or Place for Abstract Painting. The image that came with the email showed this sentence written … More

Like Tom Roberts before him, David Aspden (1935-2005) was born in rural England and arrived in Australia around the age of fifteen. This is a time of life when the biggest part of one’s adult personality is already formed. Roberts, who grew up in the age of Empire, was never quite sure if he was … More

One often reads about an artist’s ‘late style’, an autumnal period where a painter feels his mortality, slows down and mellows his palette. John Hoyland, who will be 77 this year, has obviously never heard of this concept. The paintings Hoyland is producing today are more raw, more free, more experimental than the works he … More

May is becoming a crowded month, with works for the Head On Photo Festival being shown in more than 80 venues across the city. In addition there is a new round of exhibitions at the Art Gallery of NSW, and also a touch of musical chairs. Sullivan and Stumpf relocated to a spacious new venue … More

Enrique Martínez Celaya is an overachiever by any standard. An American artist of Cuban extraction, he has been feted and praised as only the United States can fete and praise. More