Art: Bald Archy 2010

For those who may not have heard of it, the Bald Archy is an art prize which parodies the Archbald. The winner is announced on April Fool’s Day and the entries often are humorous or satirical works of prominent persons and personalities.  Winners are supposedly selected by Maude, a sulphur-crested cockatoo.

This year’s winner is Judy Nadin with a portrait of Bert Newton in the buff.It's called Patti's Cake (Patti is Bert's wife).  Nadin says that she saw Newton as “cheeky” and that is how she painted him.

Art: The Archibald and Dobell

The winner of the Archibald Prize has been announced, Sam Leach for a portrait of Tim Minchin. I personally find it a bit of a ho-hum painting but each to his own.

The Archibald is today regarded as the foremost portraiture prize in Australia (a $50,000 prize), although it is being rivalled by the Moran National Portrait Prize ($100,000 prize, the richest portrait prize in Australia and in the world).

As a digression, an artist, Roger Akinin, once saw a photo of me asleep on a couch with cats perched on me. Although I didn't know him, he asked to paint that image and for me to sit for him. I agreed and, whilst the portrait was submitted but not accepted as a finalist for the Archibald, it did make the final 5 for the 2000 Moran National Portrait Prize.

(Click on pics to enlarge)

Art: Bruno Torf's Sculpture Garden

(Click on photos to enlarge).

Marysville is a little town about 100 kilometres out of Melbourne that came into existence as a stopping point for those travelling to the goldfields. Named after Mary Steavenson, the wife of Assistant Commissioner of Roads and Bridges John Steavenson, it continued its stopping point status when the coach route passed through, eventually becoming a tourist attraction in its own right for its bushwalking, views, gullies and lush rainforests. From the 1920’s tourism became the mainstay of the Marysville economy.  Over the years cafes, art galleries, restaurants, and craft shops developed, catering to that industry. It is also used as a base for those travelling to the snowfields.  It came to be referred to as "God's own garden".

One year ago, on Saturday, 7 February 2009, the fires hit Marysville.

Believed by the police to have  been the result of arson. 45 people died in Marysville and the surrounding locality, with 90% of the Marysville buildings destroyed.  In total, 173 people died from the fires. That day is now known as Black Saturday.  Following the fires, the police shut the whole of Marysville down as a crime scene and restricted access, whilst they went through the grim task of searching for, and extracting, bodies ruin by ruin..

Art: Van Gogh / The Potato Eaters

“I have tried to make it clear how those people, eating their potatoes under the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in their dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food. I have wanted to give the impression of quite a different way of living than that of us civilized people. Therefore I am not at all anxious for everyone to like it or to admire it at once.”

- Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), on his first major work The Potato Eaters, painted early in his artistic career and before his involvement with impressionism.

Question: Why do the people in the painting sit on the corners of the table instead of the straight parts? Would that not make a crowded room more crowded?

Art: Vincent Van Gogh / The Night Cafe

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890), letters to his brother Theo about The Night Café, painted in 1888:

"Today I am probably going to begin on the interior of the café where I have a room, by gas light, in the evening. It is what they call here a “café de nuit” (they are fairly frequent here), staying open all night. “Night prowlers” can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for a lodging, or are too drunk to be taken in.

I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green.

In my picture of the “Night Café” I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace of pale sulphur."

The café depicted is a café in Arles in which van Gogh had a room. In other letters he writes of searching for peace in his life: “I only wish that someone could prove to us something calming which comforted us, so that… we could go forward without losing ourselves in the solitude or nothingness.” His painting of the café shows his struggle between the artificial pleasures on offer (absinthe, prostitutes) and his search for peace and something more.