Painting, More Painting: A show more about power than paint

Photo of inside of Painting more Painting exhibition

The curators at ACCA need to get out more. Painting, more painting, purportedly an overview of contemporary Australian painting, constructs a narrative not about painting but about power in our publicly funded galleries.

This curatorial high priesthood has put together their version of the canon, and it’s a very narrow one. The unrepresentative swill (with thanks to P. Keating) exhibited in Painting, more painting is the result. Predictably, like the joke about Catholics in heaven, the conceptualists are pretending that there is no one else here. This narrative hegemony amounts to a concealment of the real status of painting – tantamount to government censorship.

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Clarice Beckett Exhibition Review

Clarice Beckett

Clarice Beckett: The Ordinary Instant
2 July to 11 September,

The Gallery, Bayside Arts and Cultural Centre, Brighton

 Clarice-Beckett-Sunset-Presskit

Beckett’s lyrical soft focus paintings are associated with the tonal school of Max Meldrum and his obsession with contrasting shapes and pattern. This exhibition of over fifty works by Beckett (1887–1935) is shown in the context of seven contemporary women painters responding to her work:  Lynne Boyd, Michelle Hamer, Kristin Headlam, Pia Murphy, Saffron Newey, Victoria Reichelt and Camilla Tadich.

Meldrum didn’t believe in drawing – his teleological view of art allowed him to believe he had discovered a new ‘science of appearances’ which superceded line drawing. Beckett adopted his views on

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Autumnal – What the Artist Saw

Studley Park looking across the Abbotsford Children's Farm to Mt Macedon
Studley Park looking across the Abbotsford Children’s Farm to Mt Macedon

The skies are overcast in palest purple with a lemon horizon as I drive down Studley Park Rd towards Abbotsford.

It’s after lunch and the light is in the western half of the sky, but low on the horizon shooting a warm yellow haze over the suburbs.  There’s a long low shape of a warehouse painted in orange which sets off perfectly the blue distance of the city beyond. It’s May and the air is brisk, crisp, making you move more quickly but not yet to the sudden-intake-of-breath cold we will get to in July. 

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A Quiet Day in Northcote

Alexandra Sasse painting Northcote
Painting the canvas 'A Quiet Day in Northcote' 2016 Alexandra Sasse
Painting the canvas ‘A Quiet Day in Northcote’ 2016 Alexandra Sasse

Painting in others’ footsteps

I am in the final stages of a landscape painting which will be called A Quiet Day in Northcote. Perhaps Arthur Boyd was right when he said …all Australian paintings are in some way a homage to Tom Roberts … as Roberts’ own work A QUIET DAY ON DAREBIN CREEK, has been much in my mind as I worked on this picture.

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