Alias Arts

Two things that I have quickly noticed about the city of Melbourne is their love for AFL (Australian Football League) and their love for Melbourne artists. I passed thousands of supporters dressed in brown and yellow everything yesterday, so I’m glad I wasn’t wearing the colors of the opposing team. It’s not just guys that are fanatical about the sport, everyone seems to be. If I hang around Melbourne for much longer I might even go to a game to see what they’re all so excited about.

After reading a few reviews in local newspapers of the current John Brack exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, it makes me think that they love their artists as much as their athletes. I can’t remember the exact words of one glowing review in a major newspaper but it called it a perfect exhibition and urged anyone with an Australian bone in their body to rush down and experience this art utopia.

I wouldn’t dare tell this to a Melbournite, but I wasn’t that impressed with the John Brack exhibition. Although he does have a few iconic pictures that depict a particular time and place in Australia like Collins St, 5p.m. from 1955 (pictured), The Car from 1955, and The Bar from 1954.

After the 1950s I started to lose concentration. It was like he was trying to be something that he wasn’t, trying to be new like a lot of art being produced in America around the same time. I became a little more interested in the 1980s when he was painting pencils, but I eventually returned to the 1950s rooms to leave the exhibition on a high note.

The Battle – 1983 – John Brack uses pencils to depict French and British soldiers in the Battle of Waterloo

I was much more impressed by a room of Fred Williams paintings in the free section of the gallery. Here’s some work by Fred Williams online. Fred Williams is also from this area, so I probably wouldn’t be hung for admitting that I like him more.

One of my favorite female painters is showing at the Hauser & Wirth Zürich gallery in Switzerland. “Joan Mitchell – Sunflowers” runs from June 6 through to July 25.

I like paintings that look like they were fun to paint. Art doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that for me. Concepts and theories come a distant second. If I can’t relate to the painting of a picture, I move on to the next one.

From the exhibition press release..
“Joan Mitchell’s Sunflower paintings count amongst the most experimental and vibrant of all
her works. In the upstairs gallery at Hauser & Wirth Zürich, six canvases dating from the
1960s and the year before her death, etchings and drawings host an extraordinary diversity of
marks with compositions whose ungovernable vitality refuse to comply to the rules of image
making. Mitchell considered sunflowers to be ‘like people’ — subjects to empathise with
whose life cycles were played out with exuberance but brutal swiftness. ‘If I see a sunflower
drooping, I can droop with it,’ she explained, ‘and I draw it, and feel it until its death.’ Like
van Gogh whose precedent she was brave enough to summon, she embraced sunflowers for
their hopefulness as much as for their assertive and undeniable splendour. Her images do not
much resemble the plants themselves: they are blue and red as well as golden, erratically
dancing sweeps of colour that communicate internal as much as external landscape.”

Here’s a link to the Joan Mitchell Foundation too.