highlyeccentric (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
highlyeccentric) wrote2013-07-29 04:29 pm
highlyeccentric) wrote2013-07-29 04:29 pm
I had to make a Sydney icon just for this post
... in all these years, the only Sydney icon I've made is my default 'one way both ways' road sign - which is, alas, no longer in situ.
After seeing my boxes off in a truck this morning, and taking some more accumulated household items to the local Salvos Store, I set off into the city for to see the exhibit 'Sydney Moderns' at the Art Gallery of NSW.
I was inititally a little disappointed to recognise, upon arriving, 'modernist' art as a style I've never liked much. All the block colours and colouring-book lines lend themselves well to cross-stitch, I guess, but I never quite 'get' it, the curatorial jabber about breaking from tradition and the excitement of the future and so on. It's usually just so much paint to me. For instance: Cossington-Smith's interior with wardrobe mirror. The gallery website quotes Cossington-Smith on her dislike of flat, unlively colour, but that's exactly what that painting looks like to me: so many block colours arranged to look like a bedroom.
Turns out that I do appreciate something of the modernist aesthetic when it's places I know. Consider Cossington-Smith's Curve of the Bridge. I know that bridge; it has fascinated me, too. Were it a picture of a seaside in France, Margaret Preston's Sydney Bridge would bore me. But I know the area, and even sixty years on the choice of a few dominant colours makes sense, captures something of the area.
Harold Cazneaux's Sydney Bridge really caught my breath, though. I find it interestng that Cazneaux and Cossington-Smith were both fascinated with the bridge frame, but Cossington-Smith's work emphasises curve and lightness, as if the bridge is about to take off into the sky; Cazneaux's bridge is angular, and light filters through it.
I suppose the thing is that the urban expansion on which most of the Sydney Moderns exhibit focuses is not just the present-future of the artists, but the past-present, the inherited city into which I have grown. That makes a difference. Show me umpty-million pictures of French peasants and it's all so much paint, but Sydney I am interested in.
Not a landscape, but Ethel Spowers' Swings is gorgeous. Olive Cotton's Max after Surfing is also striking - especially as the exhibit lines it up next to the aforesaid Max (Dupain)'s photographs of nude women in motion.
Also, wonders will never cease, but I found a still life I actually like, out in the main galleries. George Lambert's Tulips and Other Stimulants. Important People is also pretty cool. Some of his landscapes bore me, though. And nothing compares to Self Portrait With Gladioli. George Lambert, ladies and gentlemen. He has a gladiolus and he is not ashamed.
I came away with a stack of postcards, and a mounted card copy of Cazneaux's "Sydney Bridge". Just, y'know, in case I move away or something.
Also I took some photos in the parks on my way back to the station. On my phone, which has very poor ability to manage light and shadow (the trick which used to work on my old point-and-shoot camera, of focusing on something in the shadow to get the right light setting before moving your frame to take in sunny parts as well - doesn't work on the phone). I'm regretting not having taken my actual camera, but some of these are OK.
The Domain, sundrenched in winter.
I really like the lines in this one, but the fountain should be sparkling, not shadowy. Bah. Next time, take camera.
Centrepoint and the top of David Jones
After seeing my boxes off in a truck this morning, and taking some more accumulated household items to the local Salvos Store, I set off into the city for to see the exhibit 'Sydney Moderns' at the Art Gallery of NSW.
I was inititally a little disappointed to recognise, upon arriving, 'modernist' art as a style I've never liked much. All the block colours and colouring-book lines lend themselves well to cross-stitch, I guess, but I never quite 'get' it, the curatorial jabber about breaking from tradition and the excitement of the future and so on. It's usually just so much paint to me. For instance: Cossington-Smith's interior with wardrobe mirror. The gallery website quotes Cossington-Smith on her dislike of flat, unlively colour, but that's exactly what that painting looks like to me: so many block colours arranged to look like a bedroom.
Turns out that I do appreciate something of the modernist aesthetic when it's places I know. Consider Cossington-Smith's Curve of the Bridge. I know that bridge; it has fascinated me, too. Were it a picture of a seaside in France, Margaret Preston's Sydney Bridge would bore me. But I know the area, and even sixty years on the choice of a few dominant colours makes sense, captures something of the area.
Harold Cazneaux's Sydney Bridge really caught my breath, though. I find it interestng that Cazneaux and Cossington-Smith were both fascinated with the bridge frame, but Cossington-Smith's work emphasises curve and lightness, as if the bridge is about to take off into the sky; Cazneaux's bridge is angular, and light filters through it.
I suppose the thing is that the urban expansion on which most of the Sydney Moderns exhibit focuses is not just the present-future of the artists, but the past-present, the inherited city into which I have grown. That makes a difference. Show me umpty-million pictures of French peasants and it's all so much paint, but Sydney I am interested in.
Not a landscape, but Ethel Spowers' Swings is gorgeous. Olive Cotton's Max after Surfing is also striking - especially as the exhibit lines it up next to the aforesaid Max (Dupain)'s photographs of nude women in motion.
Also, wonders will never cease, but I found a still life I actually like, out in the main galleries. George Lambert's Tulips and Other Stimulants. Important People is also pretty cool. Some of his landscapes bore me, though. And nothing compares to Self Portrait With Gladioli. George Lambert, ladies and gentlemen. He has a gladiolus and he is not ashamed.
I came away with a stack of postcards, and a mounted card copy of Cazneaux's "Sydney Bridge". Just, y'know, in case I move away or something.
Also I took some photos in the parks on my way back to the station. On my phone, which has very poor ability to manage light and shadow (the trick which used to work on my old point-and-shoot camera, of focusing on something in the shadow to get the right light setting before moving your frame to take in sunny parts as well - doesn't work on the phone). I'm regretting not having taken my actual camera, but some of these are OK.
The Domain, sundrenched in winter.
I really like the lines in this one, but the fountain should be sparkling, not shadowy. Bah. Next time, take camera.
Centrepoint and the top of David Jones