Lots of outdoor activity.

And in my wanderings, I remembered these two archetypal beach scenes.

So much physicality. So much manliness. A sporty, healthy, idealised and stylised outdoor scene from the 1940s.

| Charles Meere, Australian Beach Pattern, 1940 |

Meer’s student and partner, Freda Robertshaw, goes on to create a more ladylike family beach scene.  At one with nature. Although exhibiting the motherly cautiousness toward an unknown sea.

| Freda Robertshaw, Australian Beach Scene, 1940 |

Contemporary scenes aren’t quite as idealised but I was pleased to experience my first ever Surf Life Saving Carnival this summer.

Julia Ritson

The two sisters share a number of artistic qualities: scale, colour, and an eye for fine detail.

Julia Ritson explores abstraction, adding a vibrant chapter to a century-old tradition.

Joanne Ritson brings a 21st Century perspective to the venerable history of landscape painting, that of virtual not physical worlds.

Joanne and Julia embrace the manifold potential of textile printing in their limited edition art scarves, extending and enriching their traditional studio practices.

An Australian newspaper at the time referred them as ‘weird distortions… fit only to be worshipped by art devotees.’ Oh dear.

They would have created some lovely postwar brightness.

Zika Ascher was one of the first to get together with artists in fashion collaborations.  While his wife Lida was getting on with fabrics for the Queen no less.

Now Sam, the grandson of Zika and Lida is doing the same.  He’s looked at the archives and made them available for us again. To brighten things up.

| Ben Nicholson scarf | Georges Melbourne advertisement from The Argus 1947 |

Ascher Studio

Julia Ritson

Although LeWitt’s work was a lot about serial images he never stopped changing. Pushed an idea right to the end and then moved on.

In the Smithsonian Archives of American Art website there is a lengthy interview with LeWitt from 1974.  “The logic of the serial image was the important thing to me. At first it was the image, but then it became the fact of seeing things from three different angles, as they emerged and changed. It had a beginning and an ending. A kind of philosophical realism.”

In his 1978 book titled PhotoGrids, we see LeWitt gridding up within the grid.  This is one of his many publications.  A favourite.

| PhotoGrids, Sol LeWitt, Paul David Press, Rizzoli New York, 1978 |

Julia Ritson