As a young child approaching my grandparent’s farm out beyond Bugaldie, north-west of Coonabarabran, I used to stare out the car window. After many hours on the road, mesmerised by hours of endless gum trees, the Warrumbungle Mountains finally appeared. As we drove along the flat plain near the railway siding of Bugaldie, my mother […]
When Norman Victor Reid went to join the AIF at Sydney on 11 February 1915 he was still 11 months short of the minimum age for enlistment (19). So, he took with him a letter from his father giving him permission to join the Army Medical Corps and go to the front. Norman was accepted […]
It’s a simple message, welcoming visitors to the Maitland Regional Art Gallery (MRAG) – don’t worry, be happy. A smiling cloud sheds happy tears, brightening the day of anyone who sees it on the outside of MRAG, where it was installed in 2019. Its message is most effective at night, when its neon light illuminates […]
It may have been painted 340 years later and on the other side of the world, but Michael Fitzjames (1948-) has channelled the spirit of the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer’s famous View of Delft (1663) in View of Maitland from the riverbank (2006). Like Vermeer, Fitzjames has split his canvas into three horizontal bands of […]
A question the artistic collective AES+F ask of themselves is: despite our technological advancement, how different are we psychologically from the people who lived in antiquity? The four artists of AES+F, Tatiana Arzamasova (1955-), Lev Evzovich (1958-), Evgeny Svyatsky (1957-) and Vladimir Fridkes (1956-), explore this query through highly produced video and photographic works that […]
It takes many minds to create an artwork on the scale of AES+F’s panoramic video works. Four, to be precise. AES+F is the collective of Tatiana Arzamasova (1955-), Lev Evzovich (1958-), Evgeny Svyatsky (1957-) and Vladimir Fridkes (1956-), who have been practising together since 1987. They have produced multi-channel video installations since 2007, when their […]
Art, and especially great art, is not made in isolation. Societal needs, environmental input, and personal experience all combine to create an expression of emotion that is uniquely human, and therefore relatable to all. Artist John Coburn (1925-2006) spent his early years around Ingham, Queensland, before joining the Australian Navy at seventeen. During this time, […]
For many artists, creative practice whether written, painted, sculpted or otherwise, is about exploring and explaining the human condition – the things that make us human including, birth, death, emotions and existence. It can ask big and broad or sweeping questions, about life, the universe, and our place in it. It can also explore more […]
On a wall in her studio, Jenny Sages (1933-) has written the phrase ‘OLD LADIES CAN DOOIT.’ Though the extra O was a charming mistake, it is a message that resonates throughout Sages’ prolific career as a portraitist and abstract painter. Born in 1933, she spent most of her life as a fashion illustrator before […]
While he was alive, Robert Klippel (1920-2001) lived in a nest of curious items. Each of the twenty-six rooms in his house were filled with scrap metal, wood, and junk. The materials he found were sorted and placed in separate rooms so that he could live each day assembling objects out of the various shapes […]
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