‘An enormous spiritual presence’ wins Blake Prize for artist

THERE can’t be many winners of the Blake Prize who were ordained in the Russian Orthodox Church, let alone winners who once sang on stage with the Bee Gees at a Christmas gala.

But Brisbane’s Leonard Brown – who yesterday won the prestigious $20,000 first prize in Australia’s annual award for religious art – can boast both in a spiritual journey that has taken most of his 61 years.

Brown’s painstaking and deceptively simple abstract painting If You Put Your Ear Close, You’ll Hear it Breathing pipped other more graphic and controversial works, including pedophilia in the Catholic Church (Rodney Pople) and racism (Fiona White, who won the $5000 prize for human justice). The three judges described Brown’s as ”a work with an enormous spiritual presence [and] outstanding visual intelligence”.

Romantics at Tate Britain, review

The re-hang of Tate Britain’s Clore Galleries is an infuriating shambles. Rating: *
 
By Richard Dorment

It will be interesting to see whether Tate Britain’s new director, Penelope Curtis, can do anything about the curse of the Clore Gallery. This museum-within-a-museum housing Turner’s bequest to the nation of 300 oil paintings and more than 20,000 works on paper opened in 1987 to a chorus of boos from the critics. In fact, the building itself isn’t too bad; the problem is that the architect, James Stirling, put the bloomin’ thing in exactly the wrong place – to the side of the original 1897 gallery set back from the front entrance.

The positioning of the new building destroyed the integrity of the rest of collection by hamstringing the Tate’s ability to tell the story of British art in chronological order. However you hang the permanent collection, it is now impossible to place Turner where he belongs – smack in the middle, surrounded by the work of the artists he imitated, competed with and inspired.
So I was sympathetic to the idea of a major re-hang of the Clore Galleries that placed Turner alongside contemporaries such as David Wilkie, Samuel Palmer, Richard Dadd and William Etty. Had the new displays been organised by people with the smallest interest in art as a visual experience, it could have worked beautifully. As it is, Romantics is a complete shambles.

Virtual art fair uses big guns to woo collectors

Scott Reyburn
THE internet revolution has at last reached international art fairs, with a new event testing the willingness of buyers to shop online for contemporary works.

Billionaire collectors and their agents spend weeks each year travelling the world to art events such as Art Basel. Now they are being urged to save time and money and buy from home at the virtual VIP Art Fair, announced this month.

”Just out of curiosity, VIP is going to attract a lot of visitors,” says Todd Levin, a New York art adviser and curator. ”People have become confident about buying from J-PEGs [digital photos], as long as they can be sure about the condition of a piece.”

If VIP is a success, other online events may follow and traditional fairs may have to enhance their web presence, dealers say. The event will challenge the internet’s reputation for being mainly a selling platform for lower-value artworks. VIP will offer pieces by artists such as Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Damien Hirst and Andreas Gursky.

The secret behind Mona Lisa’s smile

The secret of how Leonardo da Vinci produced the optical effects that created the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile can be revealed for the first time.
 
By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent

Scientists have discovered how the artist managed to achieve his trademark smoky effect, known as sfumato, on the painting; by applying up to 40 layers of extremely thin glaze thought to have been smeared on with his fingers.

The glaze, mixed with subtly different pigments, creates the slight blurring and shadows around the mouth that give the Mona Lisa her barely noticeable smile that seems to disappear when looked at directly.

Using X-rays to study the painting, the researchers were able to see how the layers of glaze and paint had been built up to varying levels on different areas of the face.

With the drying times for the glaze taking months, such effects would have taken years to achieve.

The scientists also suspect that he used his fingers to apply the glaze to his paintings as there are no brush marks or contours visible on the paintings.

Leonardo is known to have employed the sfumato effect to seamlessly blend shading together and to blur outlines. But the exact techniques used to achieve this have long fascinated and intrigued art experts.

Stone the crows, Broome has come to the Brickworks

Joyce Morgan
Six tonnes of red outback dirt have been installed in a former kiln at St Peter’s which now echoes with Australian birdsong, including a persistent crow.

Three former kilns are the unlikely venue for an art work entitled The Sound of Red Earth that has opened the former industrial spaces to the public for the first time.

Inside, the three kilns look like crypts, as though they may have once housed bodies rather than bricks.

For the next month, each kiln resonates with a different natural sound: wildlife, water and wind.

Lighting has been installed and dirt floors raked, including the earth brought across from Broome.

The soundscapes have been created by leading US sound artist Stephen Vitiello after field trips to the Kimberley.

There he recorded bird and animal calls in waterholes and rivers. And by converting light waves to sound, he even captured the “sound” of the stars.

As he worked during the day, he was accompanied by a large, noisy crow.

“It felt like everywhere I’d go, that bird was over my shoulder,” says Vitiello.

So he incorporated the crow’s distinctive call into his soundscape.

Vitiello, a former punk guitarist, hopes his artwork will make people pay more attention to the natural sounds around them.

The sound work is the latest Kaldor Public Art Project, which has brought to Sydney a range of contemporary artists including Gilbert and George, Jeff Koons’s giant floral Puppy and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who famously wrapped Little Bay.

Its founder John Kaldor commissioned Vitiello after falling in love with the Kimberley during his first visit there about a decade ago.

“You see the grandeur and vastness of the Australian continent,” Mr Kaldor said.

“The Australian landscape has been painted by indigenous painters and Western artists since the colonial days, but very little work has been done with the sound.”

A companion piece by Vitiello called The Birds, based on Daphne du Maurier’s story, is at the Art Gallery of NSW.

The Sound of Red Earth is at the Sydney Park Brickworks, cnr Sydney Park Rd and Princes Highway, St Peters, until September 12. Monday-Friday 12-6pm. Weekends 10am-5pm. Free.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/stone-the-crows-broome-has-come-to-the-brickworks-20100819-12rkm.html

Edinburgh Art Festival 2010: Jupiter Artland; William Wegman; Edward Weston

Richard Dorment on a quirky sculpture park, and two displays of US art .
 
By Richard Dorment

Sculpture parks usually bore me stiff. They’re so predictable with their exquisitely sited Henry Moores, Richard Longs or Tony Craggs screaming the owner’s classic (but cautious) good taste. But if you are in Edinburgh this month, I urge you to take the time to visit Jupiter Artland, a privately owned sculpture park in West Lothian, about half an hour’s drive west from the city centre. What makes a walk through the woods and gardens here more entertaining than any other outdoor display of sculpture I know is the sure but quirky taste of the collectors Robert and Nicky Wilson.

From Jim Lambie’s mural-size chrome panels set into an outside wall to Cornelia Parker’s giant shotgun leaning against a tree, most of the artists in the collection have come up with unexpected responses to specific sites on the property.

Brandenburg embraces Italy for inspiration

Adam Fulton
THE Australian Brandenburg Orchestra will take a looser approach and cross musical boundaries next year in a program flush with Italian flavours inspired by its artistic chief’s recent visit to the country.

Works from Mozart and Handel as well as Italian composers such as Vivaldi figure large in a line-up featuring the Perth mezzo soprano Fiona Campbell – a favoured singing partner of the tenor Jose Carreras – members of the Italian early music ensemble Accordone and a double bill of the Canadian period violinist Marc Destrube and the American Kristian Bezuidenhout on a replica of the fortepiano played by the young Mozart.

Martin Creed at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, review

Martin Creed goes to a lot of trouble to make art that doesn’t look like art.
A Scottish Turner Prize winner whose work is on view this summer at Edinburgh is the conceptual artist, poet, and musician Martin Creed, whose ineffable blend of goofy humour and profound thought fits seamlessly into the existing collections of Dada and Surrealist art in the SNGMA.

The first work by Creed you see as you approach the gallery is the sign over the entrance in big bold neon letters assuring us that “Everything’s Going To Be Alright”. This is, quite simply, my favourite work of contemporary art, the one luxury I’d want to take with me to a desert island. David Cameron should buy it to hang over the door at 10 Downing Street.

Because whatever the situation, these are the only words any of us wants to hear. Politicians always promise us prosperity and progress. But all we really want is reassurance – and Creed has come up with the most comforting sentence in the English language.

Creed goes to a lot of trouble to make art that doesn’t look like art – or rather, doesn’t look like interesting or important art. He works by stacking or placing everyday things on top of or alongside each other in such a way that the finished artwork makes you feel good – not great, mind, just good.

In his current show at the Fruitmarket Gallery (until October 31), for example, he lays a store-bought plank of wood flat on the gallery floor, and then stacks dozens of identical planks on top of it until the stack reaches the height of one of the planks when it is turned vertically to stand in an upright position.

The result looks a bit like a minimalist sculpture by Donald Judd, except that Creed isn’t interested in providing us with a glorious aesthetic experience – he just wants to show how you can make something that’s nice to look at out of almost nothing by putting things that already exist in the world in a particular order.

Creed has also adjusted the gallery’s main staircase so that as your foot falls on each step it plays a note on the musical scale. The higher you ascend the lighter and happier you feel. And that is the really important thing to say about Creed’s art: it is about how to be happy, about keeping things simple and lowering expectations, identifying good feelings, and not wanting too much.

Seeing this show, I was struck for the first time by the resemblances between his unpretentious art and the still lifes of Giorgio Morandi – another self-effacing artist who somehow managed to imbue simple arrangements of ordinary things with what I can only call moral beauty.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/7935107/Martin-Creed-at-the-Fruitmarket-Gallery-Edinburgh-review.html

Grace Robertson, interview with the 1950s photojournalist

Grace Robertson, now 80, tells Anna Murphy about the remarkable postwar women who were her first – and best – subjects.
 
By Anna Murphy

It is the clothes more than anything that reveal this to be a very different world from our own. The bloomers and the fox furs of a group of Bermondsey women on their day trip to Margate in 1954. The feathered hat and lorgnette-framed stare of a Tate Gallery-going Medusa in 1952. A regiment of young women, standing to attention with cigarette holders, in 1955. Grace Robertson’s photographs capture like no one else’s what it was to be an Englishwoman in the years after the war.

And then there is what lies just beneath the surface of these photographs. Not only the whalebone corsets of the Bermondsey women (’It gave them beautiful posture, and I remember one of them coming up to me and putting her hand in my back and saying, “Stand up, Grace,” and I thought, “No, I am not wearing a whalebone corset”‘), but also the barely disguised determination of those smoke-garlanded twentysomethings, their thoughts focused on an evening of attempted husband-hooking.

(’That shot where they are all standing with their cigarettes in holders… well, when everything was ready and they were just about due to have the party, that blonde, who seemed to be the leader, said, “Come on, girls, cigarette time.” It seemed to be ritual. “Are we ready?” “Yes,” they all chorused, and they all took a big puff of their cigarettes then went about their business. They were all women in their early twenties and they were hunting for men, and what the blonde was saying was “Are we ready for the men?” I asked one of them later if that was what it meant and she said, “Oh, yes, I am 24. I only have a little while to go.”‘)

Topless women refuse to take ban lying down

ADAM FULTON
THE Wesley Mission charity has been accused of censorship after blocking a “tasteful” photo of two topless women from winning a prize in a photographic competition backed by the City of Sydney.

Four of the five judges in the charity’s MyPlace-MyFace contest are believed to have chosen the photo of the women, pictured on a hotel bed, for a second-place award. But the chief judge was told this week to find a replacement because the mission thought the picture inappropriate and wanted it removed from the contest.

The photographer, Isabella Melody Moore, saw nothing improper about her picture and said blocking it amounted to censorship. “Nudity is shown all the time in photography. It’s an art … It is disappointing because I would’ve liked my photo to be shown.”