Art experiences
Today walking home from the Art Gallery I was doing the meditation of imagining myself 20 years in the future again, and thinking of how I will remember this time. The impression was of something rich and multi-coloured, full of vividness and varied designs. Like my calendar looks on my wall at the moment - three things a day in all different colours. And the art book section of my book case - lots of new volumes of the gorgeous and novel things I've seen and am learning about.
Here are some recent ones:
Opera
I have one more class in Beginner's Guide to Opera, and it has been positively life-changing. I'm listening to the first ever one, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, borrowed from my ex-neighbours. I want to go out and buy heaps more, but will save up first. In class the teacher said people tend to come to opera late in life, and I've been wondering why that is. I can remember the former irritated feeling when the neighbors (different ones from above) played soprano arias in the afternoons, but now the sound of a colluratura going for it on the high notes gives me chills. The stories are so simple but the emotions so large, and the Italian libretti are fascinating and beautiful. I still get moved by popular music (huge emo-fest on Rage last night and I didn't turn it off or feel above it) but I'm more interested in learning more about this opera stuff and listening to it all the time.
Specifically, La Traviata
A friend send me a link to sign up for two free tickets to La Traviata, broadcast from inside the Opera House onto a giant screen in the forecourt. I went along last night and it was fabulous. The vision and sound were both really crisp so you felt like you were right there, and the voices were so gorgeous I got aforementioned chills. The cast came up and did a curtain call just for us outside, and it was a gorgeous late-summer Sydney night, and the Opera House loomed grandly behind us and the bridge was there and the ferries were going and it was all just wonderful. The season finishes on March 31 but I have grand plans to save up and go along to the winter season, at least one. The only thing I worry about is drifting off a slight bit when going to a live, bought one inside, because it's so expensive and so fleeting (compared to DVDs and CDs) that you don't want to miss a second of it. Grand, though. Just grand.
Howard Arkley
Today I went to the Howard Arkley retrospective at the Art Gallery, which has travelled to us from Melbourne where he was from and which had more pictures in it. I bought the little catalogue and read it through tonight. I remember seeing one of his houses on a poster at MOCA years and years ago - must have had a show of his while he was still alive. He is famous for depicting Australian suburbia, in loving and iconographic tribute. I love the pictures and relate to them in so many ways. He's older than me but part of my generation, definitely - influenced by the Bauhaus and punk and suburbia and the mix of low and high, decorative vs serious, etc. He died quite suddenly of a drug overdose in 1999, I found out on Wikipedia tonight, four years after and in the same way as my intense journalist friend Wanda Jamrozik, who was connected with and influenced by and emblematic of that same period in Australian history - out of the suburbs, into the punk music venues, and out again into vibrant self-expression. His journey is so interesting because his art school stuff was all black and white abstract stuff, and he moved from there into figurative and (urban) landscape - just the opposite of all those Picasso books and impressionists that you read over and over, they had to learn to paint realistic landscapes and bowls full of apples, and then pushed the boundaries during their career to invent abstractionism. Arkley started with modernist minimal non-figurative stuff and pushed and grew and developed and really heard what was inside wanting to get out and express itself and he ended up with neon airbrush realistic landscapes of Australian suburban houses. They really stand out in the exhibition - they just sing. No wonder he's most known for them. Not just because they speak to us, you can really tell that the pictures themselves have something transcendant about them. This is the same thing I feel about Nick Cave, whose face is in fact on the cover of the catalogue. He pushed the form and was true to his inner vision and now does art that's pure self-expression and not part of any other movement. Both of them are inspiring to me - if I really pushed my own self, what would I find? How would my art/thought develop? From this multicoloured patchwork rich time in my personal history, I will keep on going and see.
Here are some recent ones:
Opera
I have one more class in Beginner's Guide to Opera, and it has been positively life-changing. I'm listening to the first ever one, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, borrowed from my ex-neighbours. I want to go out and buy heaps more, but will save up first. In class the teacher said people tend to come to opera late in life, and I've been wondering why that is. I can remember the former irritated feeling when the neighbors (different ones from above) played soprano arias in the afternoons, but now the sound of a colluratura going for it on the high notes gives me chills. The stories are so simple but the emotions so large, and the Italian libretti are fascinating and beautiful. I still get moved by popular music (huge emo-fest on Rage last night and I didn't turn it off or feel above it) but I'm more interested in learning more about this opera stuff and listening to it all the time.
Specifically, La Traviata
A friend send me a link to sign up for two free tickets to La Traviata, broadcast from inside the Opera House onto a giant screen in the forecourt. I went along last night and it was fabulous. The vision and sound were both really crisp so you felt like you were right there, and the voices were so gorgeous I got aforementioned chills. The cast came up and did a curtain call just for us outside, and it was a gorgeous late-summer Sydney night, and the Opera House loomed grandly behind us and the bridge was there and the ferries were going and it was all just wonderful. The season finishes on March 31 but I have grand plans to save up and go along to the winter season, at least one. The only thing I worry about is drifting off a slight bit when going to a live, bought one inside, because it's so expensive and so fleeting (compared to DVDs and CDs) that you don't want to miss a second of it. Grand, though. Just grand.
Howard Arkley
Today I went to the Howard Arkley retrospective at the Art Gallery, which has travelled to us from Melbourne where he was from and which had more pictures in it. I bought the little catalogue and read it through tonight. I remember seeing one of his houses on a poster at MOCA years and years ago - must have had a show of his while he was still alive. He is famous for depicting Australian suburbia, in loving and iconographic tribute. I love the pictures and relate to them in so many ways. He's older than me but part of my generation, definitely - influenced by the Bauhaus and punk and suburbia and the mix of low and high, decorative vs serious, etc. He died quite suddenly of a drug overdose in 1999, I found out on Wikipedia tonight, four years after and in the same way as my intense journalist friend Wanda Jamrozik, who was connected with and influenced by and emblematic of that same period in Australian history - out of the suburbs, into the punk music venues, and out again into vibrant self-expression. His journey is so interesting because his art school stuff was all black and white abstract stuff, and he moved from there into figurative and (urban) landscape - just the opposite of all those Picasso books and impressionists that you read over and over, they had to learn to paint realistic landscapes and bowls full of apples, and then pushed the boundaries during their career to invent abstractionism. Arkley started with modernist minimal non-figurative stuff and pushed and grew and developed and really heard what was inside wanting to get out and express itself and he ended up with neon airbrush realistic landscapes of Australian suburban houses. They really stand out in the exhibition - they just sing. No wonder he's most known for them. Not just because they speak to us, you can really tell that the pictures themselves have something transcendant about them. This is the same thing I feel about Nick Cave, whose face is in fact on the cover of the catalogue. He pushed the form and was true to his inner vision and now does art that's pure self-expression and not part of any other movement. Both of them are inspiring to me - if I really pushed my own self, what would I find? How would my art/thought develop? From this multicoloured patchwork rich time in my personal history, I will keep on going and see.
posted by Ellen at 11:34 pm
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