‘Afternoon Shadows’

This is a small Australian landscape painting in the Bowl at Falls creek. A related work of the same subject is Summit T-bar Fine Weather. This one is painted fast, as you can tell from the brushstrokes depicting the masses of snow gums which divide up the picture and create the form of the mountain. …

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Confused about Art?

cartoon about visiting art galleries

Are you confused about Art? Do you know what you like or where to find it? Is the work any good or is someone just trying to sell you something? And how are you expected to decipher those dense wall texts? Even Google translate is stumped.

Why I could never agree with John Berger

Image courtesy of Verso Books

 

Berger’s ground breaking Ways of Seeing was a cultural tour de force. It remains highly relevant today. But I have never been able to agree with most of what he said.

Growing up in an outer Melbourne suburb, I was blissfully unaware of Berger whose book was published when I was about 11. What I was aware of was the painful ugliness of miles of new suburban housing and the almost visceral reaction I had to the destruction of bush, re-routing of creeks and bulldozing of apple orchards in our neighbourhood.  This left me with a life-long appreciation of beauty, and a consequent resistance to any philosophy that told me I couldn’t have it, or it didn’t exist. I had seen it, and I had seen it destroyed.

So Berger and I were never going to get along, as for him, concepts like beauty are merely conditioned responses, built into us through culture by the powerful for the purpose of control.

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‘Good Cover, Falls Creek’ 2016

    Good Cover, Falls Creek was painted in the Bowl near the base of the Summit T bar in 2016. Although it was early in the season there had been very good falls the past couple of days followed by some brilliant sunshine. Despite my warmest ski gear, I can’t stay out for long so …

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Sargent, Sisley and painting in the snow

 

Alexandra Sasse painting at Falls Creek 2016
Alexandra Sasse painting at Falls Creek 2016

Painting in the snow; what is the colour of white?

 

I am painting in oil, a great medium for the brilliance of the colours of the snow and sky, although John Singer Sargent made watercolour look like the only way to approach it. This is Mountain Fire,  (1903, John Singer Sargent, Brooklyn Museum)

'Mountain Fire' John Singer Sargent. Brooklyn Museum
‘Mountain Fire’ John Singer Sargent. 1903 Brooklyn Museum

Sargent’s fluid, semi abstract approach almost suggests automatism – that kind of painting that celebrates the subconscious mind and which was popular after Freud and Jung’s theories became widely known. But leveraging the unconscious mastery of a medium

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Where Did All The Realist Art Go?

Contemporary realism: not all that glistens is gold. If you can’t spot the difference between Thomas Kinkade and any of the Spanish painters… you might as well live at McDonalds and start a swap card collection… Alexandra Sasse https://vimeo.com/153757287 Realism has always been big in Spain, although like most of the contemporary art world there …

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