Your letter of October 8th arrived yesterday: it ranks among the great letters which I have received and pushes the present exchange forward to quite a different level. It will take a long time to assimilate all of it, but it has already radically affected the present stream of my thinking. It has certainly added to the feeling that in these letters I can write in a more valuable way for whatever it is that I am seeking than through that which is destined for an exposure in publication. As you said at the beginning, a letter is a text: one has it; one holds it – and the legal profession is correct to regard it as a publication. READ MORE
Gordon Hookey Deadly Roo 2 2008, 71 x 46cm, oil & sunnies on canvas. Copy right Gordon Hookey & courtesy of Nellie Castan Gallery.
Thirty artists from what is presumed to be one cultural background have been chosen by Brenda L Croft, the curator for this inaugural Australian Indigenous Art Triennial. In fact these artists come from diverse backgrounds in each of the States and Territories of Australia and from the Torres Straight Islands, and what they have in common is that they are indigenous. This exhibition purposely coincides with the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 Referendum, whereby non-Indigenous Australians voted overwhelmingly to include Indigenous Australians on the census as citizens for the first time. Culture Warriors pays tribute to a specific group of artists whose careers span the forty years since the Referendum when they were first made Australian citizens. READ MORE
Peter Fuller belongs to the first generation whose experience was shaped by the ideals of the Welfare State. His generation has been profoundly influenced by the altruism of the National Health Service and the meritocracy of Higher Education, and he has confirmed his commitment to these values in the eighteen years he has spent writing about contemporary art. He believes that Public Patronage of Art is a crucial part of the Welfare State and that it has enabled some great art to be made but he has also been deeply saddened by the abuse of Public Patronage by fashionable international interests. READ MORE
John Bellany drawing Peter Fuller 25th April 1990.
It is now almost a year since Lynda Morris came over to our cottage in Stowlangtoft, Suffolk, and invited me to make an exhibition for the Norwich School of Art Gallery, to coincide with this year’s Norwich Triennial Festival. Lynda gave me virtually carte blanche to select any show I wished within the physical and financial limitations of the Gallery. For some time, I had been thinking about the possibility of putting together an exhibition of British drawing, and so I had no hesitation about accepting her offer. READ MORE
I saw a bug on its back waving its legs about in the small sky above its body and I asked myself, “would it prefer to be on its front?” It was then that I realised that if I had to ask the question, didn’t I already know the answer? This got me thinking. Why is it that so many people have difficulty with such a question? Why do some people wish to argue that the bug doesn’t know or care that it’s on its back? I thought it must have something to do with the world we live in. We wouldn’t accept racial segregation in our public schools or hospitals and we wouldn’t accept it if the vote was taken away from women. Yet some wouldn’t bother to flip the bug onto his belly. Is there something wrong with our society? READ MORE
Contemporary Chinese art is largely a movement of modernization and post-modernization. The ideology behind the movement is the Western philosophy and art theories of the 20th century and today. In this sense, contemporary Chinese art is also a movement of westernization. READ MORE
Ken Unsworth, titled “Untitled” 2007, watercolour on art paper, 40 x 27 cm. Photography by Paul Green.
His works are usually large, almost monumental, and one might observe produced on a grand scale. By contrast, from late 2007 until October 2008, he painted a suite of small watercolours on no larger than A3 sheets. The subjects of, and the restriction to, works on this small scale are related to the then social and domestic situations wherein he was the principal, and often sole, carer for his ill wife Elisabeth, who died in October 2008. Around this time Unsworth ceased to paint watercolours (and for the foreseeable future will not return), and turned again to planning and executing large installation works. - READ MORE
My Two Husbands had its genesis during a painting trip with a few women in the outback. We painted by day, and when evening fell like a blanket, blacking out the grey and silver of stunted trees against rich desert ochre and deepening the rose mauve gold of red sun shimmering along pearly saltpans, we gratefully put away our brushes, exhausted with the effort of trying to trap some of this fleeting miracle of light and changing colour onto paper, and retreated to stools around the campfire where we ate steaming stew, sipped wine and swapped yarns in the cold night desert air. READ MORE
