smart as Jeffrey

Today on Mount Mercer looking toward home and Mount Buninyong 

I thought the view was a painting by Jeffrey Smart.

Anywhere I look is 'toward home' because I have had no home for far too long.

Boxing belongings all week and having to assess the retainability-factor of every thing.

Exactly how much of it is necessary? Does the Dalai Llama pack?

Does he cling to favourite books?

some of these came by mail from The Gotham Book Mart and still have the notes inside that Patti Smith wrote. After a while she put in a copy of her 7" vinyl single 'Hey Joe', she must have been so pleased to have it out. and then she didn't work there any more. 

British VOGUES 1971, 1972, 1973 all arrived by air-mail and so did their binders.

Joyously received and 40 years later I am no less shallow of thought.

Do I tote all this with me to my very end or find the strength to treasure the memory and yes I'm looking at you Marcel Proust.

le temps perdu indeed.

(images by author, text is first draft, only draft)

Olley ¡Olé!

Every bit of the Margaret Olley story that I know seems incredible from the first to the last.

Bill Dobell's 1948 portrait of her was awarded the Archibald Prize - they "were both at a party given by Russell Drysdale. Margaret was wearing a fancy dress costume made from ex-war-supply parachute silk and sleeves from a friend's grandmother's wedding dress. Dobell asked if he could paint her portrait and she agreed. Olley recalled that she sat for him in his flat in Kings Cross wearing normal street clothes and an old battered hat, which she had decorated with flowers. When she saw the finished portrait, she was amazed because Dobell had not seen the fancy dress since the party. She later described it as "truly a magnificent work."
Dobell was seen running through the streets of Sydney with the still wet painting to get it to the Art Gallery of NSW before the close of entries".
And how amazing that 63 years later, Ben Quilty's portrait of her won The 2011 Archibald.

Miss Olley lived and painted for decades in what had been prior to 1964 a hat factory in Paddington NSW's Blue-Ribbon real-estate district and after her death it was no surprise that despite what must have been frightening condition it sold for $2.8m (actually with the 4-br terrace fronting Duxford St that she leased out, quite a bargain at 2.8).

Francis Bacon's studio was , in my opinion, his greatest work, and so it is with Olls.
Fortunately I am not the only one who thinks this way and the whole lot including her ashtrays with the butts still in them, has been packed in Paddo for travel up the highway to Murwillimbah and reconstructed so we can all make pilgrimages. Obviously we will merely be able to peep over the red velvet ropes to enthrall at this dust-free reassembled room built within the white-space gallery -
"the Margaret Olley Arts Centre in Murwillumbah early next year. The green kitchen, orange room and yellow room will be recreated.":

Lovely Kelim under all those bits and pieces - what tough rugs they are to survive 60 years without a good shake. Apparently she cooked a good roast and terribly important people dined there safely.
and

The most extraordinary achievement for all involved and I am just itching to get there.

 Read about it at this link - Known in her time as "Australia's greatest living legend", her work was predominantly still life and intimate interiors, much of which was featured in a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1997. (In 2006 she donated more than 130 works valued at over $7 million to the Art Gallery).

SMH
Her handsome and historic Newcastle property.
Not all her stuff went up to the fab new museum though.
Until I went gathering links for this post, I had not known that Francis Bacon's studio was also relocated from London to Dublin. 
I just love the internet informing me every day of more than one new fact.

up in a puff of smoke

Martin Sharp has died of emphysema on 1st December 2013 and this beautiful portrait of him is by his lifelong friend, Garry Shead another Australian painter whose work I also just love. This is what Mr Shead said of his portrait -
'Martin Sharp is one of Australia’s foremost pop artists as well as a cartoonist and songwriter. His psychedelic posters of Dylan and Hendrix are classics of the genre, while his posters for the Nimrod Theatre Company are also iconic in theatre circles. He also designed record covers for the rock band Cream. From 1963 to 1965 he was art director of Oz magazine. In 1970, inspired by Van Gogh’s house in Arles, he founded The Yellow House near Kings Cross which he converted into a 24-hour performance art space. During the 1970s, he was a champion of Tiny Tim and of Sydney’s Luna Park.
Martin now has emphysema. When I began visiting him I suddenly had the compulsion to paint him,’ says Shead. ‘Once I began the portrait it was like he was directing me. Martin has a museum of toys. His image of Mo (Roy Rene) became the face of Nimrod and Ginger Meggs. When I put Ginger in I suddenly realised it symbolised the boys killed in the fire at Luna Park (in 1979). Martin had the job of revamping the whole place and he enlisted the help of his artist friends, myself included.’
Shead says about the portrait, ‘I learned about Martin’s great love for Vincent van Gogh, which then influenced the way I painted it. I also saw that for Martin, Luna Park had become a metaphor for the world.’
Garry Shead has known Sharp for 50 years, first meeting at the National Art School in East Sydney. Sharp appeared in three of Shead’s experimental films, the DVD of which was released in 2011. They also published the Arty Wild Oat newspaper, which was the inspiration for Oz magazine.'

(I decided the SMH would/should have to have the most accurate Obit for him,

although one of the later paras needed a proofreader to sort the jumbled rewrite.)

In 1976 when I lived near the Paddington gallery of Clive Evatt who represented Martin, I bought a couple of signed and numbered Sharps - the gold metallic The Getting Together Of The Heads (No.22) , and The Haymarket (No.20). The first has a collage of every hippie stoney thing from early 70's counterculture London, and the second has every cartoon character known to every Baby-Boom Australian, as well as the ironic Eternity of Arthur Stace which Martin included in more than several works.
He was responsible for one of my life's magic moments when he introduced me to his friend Wandjuk (Wandjuk Djuakan Marika, OBE) who handed me his didjeridoo and explained to me how to speak into it and hear that mystical rumble. Of course I didn't achieve much, but the experience was thrilling. Thanks Martin for that, your life, and the art.

Nymph & Nymphaeas

what a thrill to see in Melbourne, 50 paintings by Monet, the guy we all know for his nymphaea (a.k.a water lilies). He began painting in Paris about 1860 and was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1865.  By 1890 he had purchased Le Pressoir  (a cider pressing house and orchard) west of Paris at Giverny where  he spent 20 years creating his garden, and fighting with the local council to get a permit for his pond. He had a rowboat made as a floating studio and spent the rest of his life recording the changing light on the pond, the bridge and the plants. Most of the works now at NGV usually reside in Paris so do try to see them here - think of the expense you will avoid. Since art is money and the money rests on the provenance, I always want to see the back of famous paintings, so here is a Monet and also his palette with the outer curve sawn off, probably when he

got too much paint on the cuff of the suitcoat he seems to have worn for painting.

 

The NGV missed the obvious opportunity unique to them, of covering their own ponds 

with waterlilies. Their giftshop was selling rubbery ones for $20.

After the art, the tart.    Nymphette Chloe

.

 - then with my dear friend and tolerant arty cohort Art Of Pants we had a delicious wine in the  Chloe room at Young and Jacksons, reputedly Melbourne's oldest surviving pub where the painting called 'Chloe' has always been the main attraction.

Painted by a contemporary of Monet, Jules Le Febvre, a medal winner of the 1875 Paris salon, she was purchased in 1880 by a Melbourne surgeon Fitzgerald. Melbourne was shocked when it saw her nudity on loan to the art gallery and she was removed to Dr FitzGeralds house where he hung her so she was visible from the street. Publican Young bought her in 1909. She hangs alone these days, but 'Young' was a big art collector and over 200 paintings, sketches and statues used to be on display throughout the hotel.

Do please click here for the story of how the damn commonwealth bank nearly ruined the corner of Swanston and Flinders Streets (the same way they succeeded in ruining what had been a fine historic intersection in Ballarat); and here is a very very old photo of Y and J's before YandJ bought it.

post impression

When out and about, one sees other travellers. This one told me she hadn't stopped moving since her husband died. Her valise was a very visual start to a very visual day. Our train arrived -

and we travelled from the city whose flag is of The Southern Cross constellation, to the station named Southern Cross - from which one cannot actually see the sky at all.
Sky RADIANCE - the new exhibition of post-Impressionists curated by Dr Ted Gott at the NGV, was the reason to travel, and to meet another blogger and step through the entry with 750 other culturati in the first 30 minutes of viewing - and radiant they certainly were.
If you know nothing about art, and you are ever pressed for an assessment, it is always safe to say "well of course it's always about 'the light' isn't it?"
So many opulent golden frames ... and silver-haired women with geometric cuts (that would have thrilled Vidal Sassoon if he could have seen them. He actually shocked 'the world' 50 years ago with his creation so radical when compared with what went before; as these painting were in their time).

Usually, I can ignore any painting of a beach and a boat, but yesterday one was my favourite of the show. Georges Seurat painted Grave Lines on The 'English' Channel many times. the one in Melbourne is very small with an very very High-Relief frame that could not be a further contrast of the simple composition.

A picture of a painting is one thing, and getting close to one is another thing altogether. Seurat, bless his paint-stained fingers, can make a boat, and convey calm pleasure out of eight tiny tiny paintstrokes.
It truly is radiant and if you were stoned you could lose yourself in it for hours more than the prolonged contemplation this sober admirer (usually having the attention-span of a canary) was happy to give it.
I loved it enough to steal it for my own. My companion informs that the title role of Seurat was played by Mandy Patinkin in a film Sundays With George. It is probably just a lovely film, but Mandy creeps me out, even in Homeland. I think that's because I saw him in Yentl, where everything creeped me out.
Beaches and boats have the same effect on me, as a direct result of going to high school so close to the shore in a fishing town, that the 'art teacher' would always make us go down there for painting and drawing the many dinghies and moorings.
On one of these days a big slobby black dog came at the group full of enthusiasm and some of the prissy girls started shreiking which escalated the whole thing until the teacher ran across Point Nepean Road to the police station. Plod attended immediately and SHOT THE DOG.
When old people tell you youngsters how different life was before mini-skirts, you'd better believe them. The teacher was probably 22 and PC Plod probably the same.  If I could only go back in a Time Machine and knock their empty heads hard together ...