Evan Salmon Exhibition 2022

Painting by Evan Salmon 'Car Carrier' 2014

Winner of the NSW Parliamentary Plein Air Award, Evan Salmon’s pared back compositions eloquently remind us that we live in the most extraordinary of worlds.

Simon Deere and Dianne Emery Exhibition

Watercolour by Dianne Emery

Award-winning artists’ reverent and intimate exploration of form, colour, and design foregrounds our need to connect in a meaningful and constructive way with the nature. Simon Deere’s interpretations of natural forms in decay evoke a sense of fragility and the bizarre. Dianne Emery’s acute perception unites scientific detail with sensibility, creating images of extraordinary beauty.

Madrid Realists’ Exhibition Review

Lopez Garcia at the Madrid Realist Exhibition: How did these artists produce such outstanding work while the art world was declaring that painting was dead?

Published in The Jackdaw June 2016
Painting by Antonio Lopez Garcia View of Madrid
‘View of Madrid from the Vallecas Fire Station’ Antonio Lopez-Garcia.

A crowd is gathered in front of a picture, there’s shuffling and whispering, angling for a better view. Several people are up close, peering at the surface plane as if cross-examining it. The buzz of conversation is rising as viewers shift their weight and linger in front of this picture. The timed entry to the exhibition means the crowd behind is building, waiting. Finally the noise, now approaching cocktail party level, is too much for the guard. She issues a loud, insistent shhhhhhhhhhh!

It’s not the Mona Lisa, and it’s neither porn nor politics

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Arthur Boyd: Landscape of the Soul

Shepparton Art Museum. 14th September – 24 November 2019.

Published in ‘TroubleMag’ and ‘Jackdaw’

Have you had any lessons? The enquiry came from a woman and her friend who had been loitering behind me as I painted en plein air in a local park. It seemed a particularly stupid question, especially considering the genius that was unfolding on the canvas. But even artists have never quite settled this amongst themselves. Is intellect or imagination more important?

Reflected Kangaroo 1976

Arthur Boyd and his circle chose imagination. Formal study, they held, sapped vitality. This was the view of the Angry Penguins, a group of Melbourne’s mid-twentieth century figurative artists which included Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and Boyd himself. Primitivism, surrealism and expressionism nourished their artistic vision. A position more remote from today’s conceptual gridlock can hardly be conceived.

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