Kongwak Market

The market, held every Sunday, in Kongwak, Gippsland (it's not even really a village, since the dairy closed) and is we're told, very popular, and it was full of people - none of whom are in this post.  This is a shot of the shed's roof and wall.

Door.  The Newport's the UK one.

Sort of essential, now not.

The Comet racer, heading into shadow-cloud...

Assemblage 1.

I like the idea of a slow motion slide button... On an Elmo 8mm projector.

Assemblage 2.

Fonts and missing bits.

Not for dusting the dairy.

Colonised gutter.

Yet now the whole building is heading to waste.

Used to be a filling station outside the general store.

James

Still life with pumpkin

Sometimes the composition occurs naturally, over time.  Winter is coming, the pumpkins are now inside.

James

Biennale Personalle

Two years ago today, we were in Venice*. As a celebration of that day out, here is a selection of photographs taken by Bev and I.

A water gate and window box achieving an Italian flag effect.

Candleholder for your plaque. Otherwise who is going to be scared by your wolf by night?

The vital Venetian chimney tops to collect sparks and avoid fire. Despite all the water, fire was a major risk.

Don't feed the cherub too much spinach.

"When you said two outboard motors, I thought..."

A delivery barge, a tree, a nap and thou...

The original Arsenal. Interestingly this Naval shipyard is still closed to the public, but I suspect the defences of Italy aren't dependant on their products as Venice's were.
Garden and church.

You can't get the plasterers to finish a job properly, here.

Church with tollbooth. Or is is an aquatic confessional?

* I'm writing this in the evening in Victoria, so it is the afternoon of the same day in Venice. With the international date line, you've got to be careful about such statements!

Linden Art is Open

Today we went to the opening of the Linden Postcard Show with a group of Bev's friends who very nicely also talked to James as well. It was a beautiful day, and a great day out.


With over 1,700 works submitted, there was a great turnout of artists and friends for the pretty brief speeches and prize hand outs. As you can see, the gallery is in a beautiful colonial Melbourne house. Sympathy moment goes to the prize winner who kicked over and broke a (hopefully empty) wineglass while going to collect her prize!


After the talk, everyone surged in to check out the art. It was packed - both on the walls and with people.


Initially it was overwhelming, but when you realised that this stage was best used to look at the people who'd come to be looked at in the opening, and save the pics for later, it became a lot more fun.


There were people of all ages, and it seemed quite a variety of backgrounds, from the "Eye em en artiste" brigade to those you don't normally expect to see in a gallery without bolt cutters and an eye mask.


On an initial glance, the sheer volume of artworks was overwhelming, but once it's clear what it's about, it's actually very straightforward. So here are the headlines:

• It's a completely open show - any entry submitted and paid for will be exhibited.
• Every piece has to fit within a 30cm (nearly 12 inch) cube.
• Any artist can submit work, no more than three pieces.
• Several will be chosen by the gallery to become postcard subjects - printed for sale - hence the name of the show.
• Most are for sale from $100 - $400 dollars (£55 -£222, or US$86 - US$347) although one that we really liked turned out to be marked at $7,000 (£3,800, US$6,000)!

(Official stuff here.)


We really enjoyed looking around, and we intend to go back for a later, more considered look. Who knows, we may take the Piggy Bank and buy something! Discussing it between the two of us and with Bev's friends, we felt that the vast majority of the works were both well executed and presented; most had been well framed or mounted. There was very little pretentious art twaddle or kittens & flower paintings, while there was a lot of humour from the 'laugh lightly once and move on' level, to some quite challenging ideas; and another neat thing was that (obviously) within a 30 cm 'box' there were no big pictures that yelled 'look at me' just because of their size. Something else had to be good: the idea or the execution.

In fact, within a tight set of technical parameters, but completely open subject and media, the artist's challenge was to catch the viewer's eye and then to hold it. No mean feat, but as you may see from the pictures here, any four people would probably pick completely different artworks from the same wall space.


And entertainment was provided by two (pretend) Hawaiian Hula girls on ukuleles - certainly the first time I can remember that type of serenade at an art event!

And then we went off to have coffee and cake, where cake and forthright views on art were shared. James marked it the best gallery experience he can recall for quite a while, and there was plenty of material for the patent RK Gallery Game (which may be explained in a forthcoming blog-post. Or not.)

All in all a good day out, and for those that are in reach of St Kilda ("Isn't everyone, Dahling?") we urge you to get down there. The show is on until 27 March 2010.

James & Bev

Beauty through the industrial landscape

Just a moment of strange beauty as the sunset came through the skyline clutter around the railway line and caused the glass power-line insulators to all catch the light. Even in such a messy and unappealing place nature can shine through.

James

Palacio de Cristal, Madrid

One of the areas I'd hoped to post on in the blog was great or interesting buildings I've liked. A combination of circumstances (a remark by Kent, a recent Laing visit to Spain) has led me to start this informal series of quirky wonders with an oddity in Madrid.

Growing up near the site of the original Crystal Palace in South London, including a few tenuous connections has meant I've always had a fascination with the buildings of the Great Exhibition era - an era where the majority of the buildings have been lost. One of the tributes to the original Crystal Palace is this little beauty in the Parque del Buen Retiro on the Paseo Duque de Fernán Nuñez, in Madrid.

A tribute to the original Crystal Palace, the Palacio de Cristal was built by Ricardo Velázquez for the 1887 exhibition on the Philippines - then a Spanish colony, and it was to be a magnificent hothouse displaying exotic plants, flowers and animals from there. It must've been amazing.

When Bev and I visited Madrid and saw it in 2000, it was most impressive, but the stark - mostly empty - interior seemed small and cramped, with some pretty uninteresting modern art. However the exterior views, and the play of light, and framing, the colourful Spanish tiling was something else. (This interesting architecture website has a couple of good views, including an interior.)

Apparently, it was built in 5 months. For the technical details, the Madrid tourist board website has the following summary:

This singular building is 54 metres long, 28 metres wide and 22.6 metres high at its highest part, and stands on a brickwork base decorated with a fine ceramic frieze.

It is laid out in the shape of a Greek cross in imitation of the cross and chancel of a church. The entrance door, which is in the Ionic style, takes the place of one of the arms of the cross. In front of this door lies a lake, surrounded by vegetation.

The architect and engineer Alberto del Palacio collaborated in the construction of the barrel vaults and the four sections of the glass dome. Another interesting feature is the decoration of the tiles by Daniel Zuloaga.

A couple of poorly researched references imply it's built with a steel framework. It's not, of course, but of cast iron, one of the great materials of the Industrial Revolution, and an architectural material that is overlooked today, mostly because of its technical redundancy. That said, the best ironwork structures (rather than the still impressive iron decoration we see) are a class of delight of their own. For me they take the flying buttress level of cathedral architecture a step further with earthy, light and strong tracery.

It's odd that, rather like an inverted Tardis, it's more impressive outside-looking in, than inside-looking-out. However, even with that caveat, it's certainly on my list of wonderful buildings of the world. I remember wandering around it, trying different ways of looking at it with, and without my camera. It's a treasure.

James