Blues Brothers by Annie Leibovitz

As January is usually the most bloated month of the year, thirty one days spent regretting the excesses of Christmas and the New Year, breaking newly minted resolutions and looking with jaded eyes at the second rate crap one has managed to accumulate, I decided to reverse the trend and declare January ‘Fun Month’. (This, incidentally, is only peripherally connected with my life as a painter). Fun month has proved to be, well, fun. I’ve probably gone out more in this last month than I have in the previous three years or so. But it’s not without its controversies: Aaron sniffily observed, when asked to babysit yet again, that I was forty not twenty, and I responded in a mature fashion by dancing around the kitchen chanting ‘party! party!’

Fox by Ron Brooks

Part of Fun Month has involved going to see art exhibitions, which obviously does relate to life as a painter. In Melbourne I saw ‘Picture This!’, an exhibition of children’s book illustration at the State Library. Great stuff, though I have to say, on the evidence of the short film of interviews with some of the illustrators playing in an alcove, some of these people are quite odd. I imagine them as being the sort of children that didn’t like to share their toys, or go outside, that recoiled in horror if asked to (gasp) play sport.

One of my favourite pictures was of a glowing red fox by Ron Brooks, who taught me Graphic Design at the Hobart Centre for the Arts, back in the day; I learned a lot from him. I spent quite a bit of time in front of this picture trying to work out how it was made: I’m thinking rag paper, coat of gesso, acrylic bumped up with gel medium, fork and pointed thing used to score lines in the paint while it’s still wet, let dry, colour with ink and acrylic paint, final glaze with oil paint for depth of colour. Cool. Only thing I wasn’t sure about was the very precise black lines, typically around the fox’s nose and tail: the black looked like it had been applied by a pen, not added afterwards, and because the lines were scored into the paint it must have happened while the paint was still wet. Interesting. I didn’t know you could get ink to flow off a pen into sticky wet acrylic- must try it sometime. Perhaps repeated dipping and rinsing the pointed thing is the key?

Brooks recently published a memoir ‘Drawn from the Heart’, RF read the review to me while I lay on her blue velvet sofa; a summarised version is that he’s struggled with lots of people, most often himself, and that being an artist was his redemption but occasionally also his torment. I haven’t read the book, I’m just going on the review and what I remember of the man, but I guess the obvious question is- if you know you’re a difficult bastard, why didn’t you do something about it?

Terracotta warriors

Back in Sydney, I had a look at the Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the MCA. Liked this enormously, admired her passion for Susan Sontag, liked the blurring between personal and professional images (until there was no real line), clucked over the photographs of her three children, considered the way some people are so good at giving the camera an image while other people seem almost naked. Defenceless. People looking at the show seemed almost hyper alert to each other’s presence, more interested and alive than is usual in a city, a bit twitchy and self conscious: almost as if the process of studying large portrait photographs reminded them that they and everyone else in the room was also human.

In the background, the thud-thud-thud of construction work at the MCA meant that exhibition tickets were cheaper than usual, a true bargain at $5. The noisiest end of the gallery was where Leibovitz’s big sublime desert landscapes were hanging. It was kind of funny: sublime landscape photographed in the religious light of pre-dawn or post-dusk, the thud-thud-thud of a compressed air hammer in the background; trying to groove on the air, space and heat in the vast photographs, then the racous knnnnniggggggnnnn of a circular saw.

Annie Leibovitz, the White Stripes

The Terracotta Warriors exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW was however a disappointment. The main problem was that I’d seen the original exhibition that toured Australia, not long after the discovery of the Chinese archaelogical site in 1974. I was only a child at the time, but the scale and number of figures had a profound effect. (A woman who saw the same exhibition as a child told me it was the reason she decided to study Chinese History at University).  I’ve still got the exhibition catalogue and for years tried to draw horses with the magnificent profile and dog like rumps of the charioteers’ steeds. I remember the original exhibition as having lots and lots of figures, many horses, something overwhelming that hinted at the vast scale of the find, and the diversity of the figures. But this time around there seemed to be quite a lot of slick digital story board presentation, small artefacts, historical summaries (sometimes repeated for people that hadn’t read an earlier board), and only a handful of warriors and their horses, lined up like nervous extras waiting for the star to come on stage.

Eventually you were spat out of the darkened gallery rooms, suddenly finding yourself in the mother of all giftshops, the ceiling dazzling with brightly coloured Chinese lanterns, specially built cabinets full of merchandise, overflowing baskets of stuff. Merchandise ranged from baby romper suits embroidered with dragon pattern (yeah, it didn’t quite work) to fairly large replicas of the sculptures (yick). Consoled myself with the AGNSW’s collection of Indian sculpture.