What caught my eye at the Australian National Gallery, Canberra (with notes from gallery signage):
Godfrey Miller, Blue Unity, 1954-55, Sydney, oil on canvas.
“He presented the throbbing life-force in everyday things through a shimmering prism, so that the objects appear to dissolve into the space around them, or into the web-like grid of the whole.”
Lenton Parr, Agamemnon, 1965, welded steel, enamel paint.
“The blackened and blistered ‘body’, with its tripod of spindly legs, seemingly metamorphoses into an armoured crab-like creature and a menacing adversary,”
Roy de Maistre, Arrested phrase from Hayden Trio in orange-red minor, Conceived in 1919, Sydney, painted in 1935, London.
“Roy de Maistre conveyed the sounds he heard – the counterpoint and the melody – in the rhythmic abstract arrangement of shapes, forms and colours. ..colour music paintings …translated the local landscape into patterns of strong forms and vivid colour.”
Along the walkway between the High Court and the National Library:
Inscribed on a monument:
Country tells us
where our ancestors
journeyed, where
they became features
in the landscape, and
where their essence
finds living beings.
This way spirit, land
and people are one.
At the School of Art at the Australian National University (ANU), I looked through the 2002 PhD thesis of Sue Lovegrove, The unsolidity of ground – a visual representation of the land (artwork), and an analysis of the painting Big Yam Dreaming (1995) by Emily Kngwarray (Dissertation). I met Sue in 2004 (?) just before she left for Antarctica with Bernadette Hince and Elizabeth Leane. There are two tomes: the Studio Report and the Dissertation. I liked her use of second person present at the start of her Dissertation. It drew me powerfully in to her line of thinking – presenting different ways people perceive Aboriginal people and their art. Her language is straightforward and personal. And there’s a humility there, and tentativeness, about entering into the unknown Aboriginal landscape.