Tag Archives: National Gallery of Victoria

End of year schedule madness

14 Saturday Dec 2019

Posted by in Art, My Journey, Writing

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We’ve entered the realm of Christmas parties and end-of-year celebrations. I had my work party last Wednesday – good chicken, disappointing dessert, my poetry group end-of-year do today and my writing group Christmas party tomorrow!

As we’ve done in the past, the poetry group visited the Ian Potter Centre at the National Gallery of Victoria to view the works in the hope of inspiring something poetic.

I spent some time sitting in front of these three works by Petrina Hicks: Fertile (2010), Into the abyss (2011), and Melo malo (2019).

Then I stood looking at this work, Force (1950-54), by Roger Kemp.

Finally I sat with this impressive sculpture, Hippolyta and the Amazons defeating Theseus (1933), by Jean Broome-Norton.

I wrote the bones of three ekphastic poems today. It’s more poetry than I’ve written in a long time, since I’ve been mainly working on prose. I hope to post some of the poems here on this blog once I get them polished up.

All the artists at the Ian Potter Centre are Australian, and all the works I viewed were in the free collection part of the gallery.

I can highly recommend hanging out in galleries with notebooks and writing whatever comes to mind. Take yourself on a date, or go with friends. You never know what might come of it.

Inspiration and Planning

15 Saturday Dec 2018

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Today I attended the end of year gathering with my poetry group. We get together in an inspiring place, today it was the National Gallery of Victoria at Federation Square, and we write, if we’re inspired, or sit and ponder, if we’re not inspired. Then we have lunch.

I went through the George Baldessin and Brett Whiteley exhibition. I’ve always like Whiteley’s work; it speaks to be somehow. I didn’t care for Baldessin. I didn’t actively dislike his work, but I didn’t like it either. Except for these pears.

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George Baldessin sculpture in the foreground, Brett Whiteley painting in the background.

I wrote an ekphrastic poem, while looking at Whiteley’s ‘The American Dream’ mural. I’ll post it next week after I’ve had a chance to revise it.

For now I’m just going to leave you with this teaser: I’m planning to self publish my second novel in February. The exact date is still TBC as I have a lot of work to do to get it ready, but I’ll have a cover to show you in the next few weeks and then I’ll be able to announce the release date.

It’s a relatively short novel, around 50k words. I’m feeling good about it, which is a bit of a weird feeling for me; most of the time I don’t think very highly of my work.

I’ve also started thinking about my New Year’s goals. Each year I’ve written myself a to-do list and I sometimes get stuff done, and sometimes don’t. I’ll be posting a new list and a wrap up of last year in January. I feel like I’ve come quite a long way recently and I’m sure I have a lot of room to grow and develop too. I’m looking forward to it.

The Nymphs and White Night

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

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I meant to do this post earlier, and I’m going to try to keep this short and sweet.

Saturday 22 February 2014 was epic. Not only was it White Night Festival in Melbourne but it was The Nymphs first album launch. White Night is a festival held  over 12 hours, 7pm to 7am, in the Melbourne CBD. It is modelled on other White Night festivals around the world. The idea, as I understand it, is to host as many free cultural events as possible in a concentrated area, and to light up buildings around the city with interesting light shows.

I haven’t been to White Night before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. It had been extremely heavily publicised and reports in the papers over the last few days have said there were in excess of half a million people on the streets of Melbourne city. My experience of White Night was kind of mixed. There was a lot of stuff on, but there were also a lot of people trying to get to it. There were a few things that fell flat, for example, an area called ‘The Vortex’ which appeared to be a bridge with fairy lights on it. On the other hand there were a few things that were pretty cool. Specifically there was a cube in the courtyard of QV which was pretty awesome, I took some video of it, here:

I also enjoyed the reproducing piano at Hamer Hall, which was playing recordings of Rachmaninov playing both his own, and other composers’ works, and the National Gallery of Victoria being open all night. Overall I would probably give it a 6.5 out of 10; there was lots of wandering about, and it was quite lucky dip with regards to attractions. Perhaps I will be more conscious to plan my night next year.

At the start of the night however, I went to the album launch of The Nymphs; It’s been a long time awaiting. The Nymphs are a four piece a capella singing group, and they’re awesome. Their supporting acts were The Blue Bottles, a garage/surf rock group of the 60s era, and Al Parkinson, a beautiful singer songwriter.

All three acts were gorgeous, you could really feel the love they had for their craft. The gig was hosted by the Kelvin Club, an old gentlemen’s club (the sort with Chesterfield sofas and pictures of ducks, not the sort with nude ladies). The room was smallish but by the end it was packed, hot, sweaty and resonant. The Nymphs, The Blue Bottles and Al Parkinson got up on stage to do a massive conglomerated encore song; It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to. Here is a small snippet:

Overall I give the album launch a 9 out of 10 because they’re all awesome.

Playing with light: Markit @ Federation Square

28 Monday May 2012

Posted by in My Journey, Photo Essay

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It’s been a while since I did a photo essay, and this one isn’t really a photo essay, it’s more a chance for me to share my experimentations from my adventure yesterday.

I was at Markit @ Federation Square. For those of you not in Melbourne Federation Square is a modern building complex that was very controversial when it was first unveiled. Its exterior looks largely like someone has designed a building, then decided they didn’t like it, screwed up the piece of paper, changed their mind, and built the crumpled version. It’s all funny angles, concrete, steel, glass and triangles; always triangles. It houses some of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and a bunch of restaurants and cafés and bars and open spaces and boutique gift shops and a stage. Markit is one of the larger semi-regular markets that can be found around Melbourne, and my markety friends Wade and Jen had a stall there, so I went to visit them.

At some point while I was chatting with them, I suggested that I get some shots of them working the stall, seeing as it’s usually one of them who has to take the photos and there are not many photos of the two of them. I got some lovely photos of their stall, I did some experiments with long exposures to get a sense of the people scurrying about but they turned out too blurry (I didn’t have the tripod with me) and I took a series of photos of a bunch of fake flowers in their stall that I kind of love.

This is the first of the set; this was taken using the automatic settings on my camera. You can see Jen in the background as well as a little bit of the glass and triangles typical of Fed Square.

This one is basically the same shot but I overexposed it. I like the way that the background becomes whitewashed and the flowers lose some of their intensity of colour. You also lose some of the detailing because of the lack of contrast.

Of course if you’re going to overexpose a shot, you may as well underexpose it too. I like that this one seems more brooding, the background is much more prominent that either of the previous two and it’s not just that the composition is slightly different.

 

This one was a sneaky shot – I just held the camera at my side and clicked it without looking at what was in the shot. I think this is an interesting shot because of the way the lamp is not really the main focus of the composition but it sort of steals the show; popping it’s head out from behind Jen’s shoulder.

I am setting myself the task of spending more time working on my journey; writing, reading, photography, drawing, sketching, playing music. I think that every so often I realise how much I have been sucked into things like TV and how lazy I’ve been with my art. Hopefully I’ll have some more awesome stuff to share with you soon.

Artist Date – The Mad Square @ NGV

11 Wednesday Jan 2012

Posted by in My Journey

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Today I went to the exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) called The Mad Square with my mum and my sister. It looks at German Modernist art from 1910-1937.

Now when I started the exhibition I didn’t really understand what Dada was, or Constructivism, or New Objectivity of Bauhaus were from an art history perspective and if I’m really honest I only have a very limited understanding of them after the exhibition. At the same time I really enjoyed looking at the art and seeing it reflected in a lot of the stuff and I’m familiar with.

For example, there was a film showing, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, which was made in 1919 and it was silent. This is the clip  they showed, unfortunately the picture quality is pretty fuzzy – there are other versions on youtube of the whole film which are much better. But two things really struck me when I saw the clip 1. it looked a lot like what Tim Burton does, and 2. it looked like the Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s video for Otherside. It is fascinating to me just how much we are influenced by the things that have gone before us even if we aren’t aware of them!

Another example that really struck me as I was walking through were the political posters, one said ‘Help Russia’ and had a picture of an emaciated peasant under the slogan, I thought we just have to change the name of the country and we could use it for any number of modern conflicts.

Hannah Höch had a whole wall dedicated to her work (and particularly to her collages) within the Dada movement looking at how the media portrayed female/males roles, how these roles were changing following World War I and how she disagreed with the rigid separation of male/female roles. I was really moved by the fact that we are still struggling with the media’s portrayal of what makes you a successful woman/man/person, with the evils of consumerism (which was the subject of one of another artist’s other pieces) and how even though the world has changed so much, even though we have made ‘progress’ we are still fighting the same battles, still trying to get decent pay for a day’s work, still trying to fight the fat cats telling us what to buy, what to wear, how to behave.

It really gave a new meaning to ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ for me; I felt as though what I’m doing in this blog, what writers, and artists, and commentators are doing is fighting that same fight to make our lives more liveable, more free.

My mother commented ‘how do they know what the artist is trying to say?’ and my sister said ‘oh they all wrote manifestos’ and my first thought was that nowadays people have blogs for that. An artist has a blog, they have followers, they create art and share it with the world. When art historians look back at the world now it will be the blogs, vlogs and the social media storms that will influence how they understand what was happening, how they attribute meaning to art works.

I felt much closer to all the artists than I have to any artists’ at an exhibit before. I felt like I had just as much right (and indeed responsibility) to use my art to create something new, to create history, to try to influence the way people think, to try to stop people from blindly following whatever they are told through the tv/internet/blogosphere.

Lately, I have spent quite a long time thinking about what I want to do with my life and one of the recent suggestions is to go back to uni. Maybe I need to go back and do an Arts degree, get to grips with Art History, Philosophy, Literature, Poetry and try to get some creative writing subjects happening too. It has been suggested that I am beyond undergraduate and that it would not be stimulating enough, but maybe there is a base there that I need to have in order to appreciate the world I live in, and want to live in creatively. I am inspired to consume as much knowledge as I can on how our world has been shaped by the 20th century and how it in turn was shaped by the centuries before it. I have never really been interested in history, but maybe I should be; maybe it will start fitting things together in a way I haven’t seen before.

I feel like opened my eyes for the first time in my life, that I’m actually SEEING things and it feels AMAZING.