Category: Journal
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Activating Surfaces
As a young man, Ellsworth Kelly was a bird watcher and then a camouflage artist with the US Army. Looking and hiding. In this work Kelly uses chance to create a collage. | Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance II, 1951 | Not dissimilar to the choppy marks of Cézanne, representing a new way of seeing.…
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Cézanne and Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly said ‘The most pleasurable thing in the world for me is to see something and then translate how I see it.’ Similarly Cézanne’s paintings were made after periods of looking long and hard. Both artists start with a concentrated response to nature that is then transmogrified into form and colour. Katherine Sachs talks about the link…
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Cézanne Seeing
As I’m painting away, I often reflect on youthful influences. Paul Cézanne popped up last week when I was looking at Godfrey Miller’s work. And then along came Ellsworth Kelly. Coincidentally, I came across a beautiful catalogue for a 2009 exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, ‘Cezanne and Beyond,’ linking contemporary paintings with Cézanne’s works. One…
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Godfrey Miller’s Counterpoint
‘Through the counterpoint of line and colour plane, the rhythmic themes and their inversions, we see the transmuted colour rhythms of the landscape shorn of superficiality.’ Another great quote from critic, collector, and best friend of Godfrey Miller, John Henshaw. Beautiful geometricised nature. A painting five years in the making. | Godfrey Miller, Two Trees…
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Godfrey Miller’s Counterspace
| Godfrey Miller, Still Life, Fruit and Flower, 1957-61 | John Henshaw, a close friend and former student of Miller’s, wrote about this painting in his 1965 book on Godfrey Miller. ‘Innumerable pencil sketches from objects which lay about on the kitchen table, fruit, comports, vases, flowers, fill notebooks. They furnished a world, sometimes in…
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Anchorite Godfrey Miller
I remember trying to paint like Godfrey Miller in the 1970s. Not very successfully. | Godfrey Miller at 54 Young Street Sydney, 1949, photo by Kerry Dundas | Miller’s experience of lying wounded for many hours on the battlefield of Gallipoli was to change him forever. From a vigorous, athletic boy to a reclusive painter.…
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Iona House Green
Iona House was surrounded by our busy dairy and potato farm. Along with raising seven children, the garden was to become a very big part of my mother Hayden’s life. And constant maintenance of the house. When the time came to re-paint the house, green and yellow tones were chosen. | Iona House , c1968…
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Iona House Red and Blue
Iona House in all its glorious Kodak Instamatic colour. There’s the old bank/playhouse on the left. Looks like we had visitors that day. | Iona House, 2066 Main Drain Road, c1960s | The architect of the Iona House, John Davidson said “Your parents were looking for a contemporary statement, not an imitation heritage, or pseudo…
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Iona House Features
In the black and white days of the Iona House at 2066 Main Drain Road, Iona, family and possessions were falling gently into place. A whole new world of light filled, curtain free spaces and a plan for a really big garden. | Iona House c1960 | The stairway up to the more formal lounge room…
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Iona House Family
| Iona House, c1960 | I contacted architect John Davidson and he kindly corresponded with me about the “Carlowrie” house at Iona. I have always loved the ramp device on the house and John mentioned it was my mother Hayden’s idea to make it easier to get the prams into the house. At this stage,…
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Iona House Beginnings
As the grand-daughter of a Koo-We-Rup East Iona pioneer, my mother Hayden Ritson (Kavanagh) inherited all sorts of land around Iona. In the late 1950s, my parents decided to build a brand new house in the modern style. It would be right next door to the Iona Post Office. They called it “Carlowrie” after the…
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Kavanagh and Featherstone
My great-grandparents, Owen Kavanagh and Catherine Featherstone, were early pioneers of Iona. | Owen Kavanagh with grand-daughter Eileen Kavanagh, 1920s | After all the hard work of digging the Main Drain and clearing the land, a real community began to grow. “The Pioneers of Koo-Wee-Rup East Iona Group (1892 to 1919)” was formed to proudly…
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Swampland
I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with Australian land. I’m sure it’s got to do with my ancestors and their struggle with the land and the obvious question of what happened to the indigenous people of the area. | Unknown, Aboriginal Australian shelter in bushland (Gippsland?), c1883, State Library of Victoria | In 1892 my…
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Fitzpatrick’s Drouin
Photographer Jim Fitzpatrick was an official war photographer for the Australian Information Service. The activities of this government department were many and varied, and in 1981 two packets of photographs of the rural Victorian town Drouin were sent back to Australia by the New York office of the A.I.S. Some of these photos had appeared…
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Drouin Drinkers
I spent my early years in Gippsland. The Swamp District. I came across this image of my Great Aunt Eileen, pulling beers, or turning on the tap, at the Drouin Hotel. Eileen Glen. | Jim Fitzpatrick, Mrs Gleeson pours a beer for customers at the Drouin Hotel, Drouin, 1944 | In 1944, the Curtin government…
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Lina Bryans Richmond
Lina Bryans met a lovely architect Alex Jelinek in the 1950s and found a really large house at 39 Erin Street, Richmond. Jelinek took this great shot of Lina doing her thing. Lina is painting a portrait of Brita Sievers, the wife of photographer Wolfgang Sievers. | Lina Bryans, 1958, photo by Alex Jelinek | Architect…
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Lina Bryans’ Pink Colony
Artists’ Colonies seem a particularly Melbourne thing in the early part of the 20th century. A dog bite was responsible for Bryans’ Colony. Lina Bryans knocked on the door of Ada May Plante (a painter friend of Jock Frater) for some help and the reclusive artist offered Lina a room to stay for the night which…
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Young Lina Bryans
Lina Bryans was born in Europe but her parents were Australian. Bryans was a Hallenstein whose family had made their money from a successful tannery and leather business in Melbourne. Her maternal great-grandfather, Sir Benjamin Benjamin, had been Lord Mayor of Melbourne in the 1880s. The family moved from St Kilda to South Yarra in the…
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Music of Lina Bryans
In memory of Brian Finemore, Lina Bryans gave one of her major late works, Landscape Quartet, to the National Gallery of Victoria. | Lina Bryans, Landscape Quartet, 1971, oil on canvasboard (4 panels) | What an amazing painting. And finally her last two paintings. Softly swirling pale landscape. | Lina Bryans, Cooper Meander, 1971, oil on canvas on…
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Lina Bryans You-Beaut
Around the same time Lina Bryans was changing direction, there was a new generation of young curators on the scene in the Australian art world.