colin mccahon

It can happen anywhere: in Miami you hear OMC's How Bizarre, on late-night television in London Smash Palace turns up, in a Japanese park you come across Maori carvings, in Hong Kong a woman is wearing a bone pendant of familiar design ... This not the shock of the new, rather the frisson of the familiar.Our culture, inchoate some say, resonates...
> culturalelsewhere/1783/colin-mccahon-in-melbourne-context-is-everything-2001/

Of all the monuments a man has built to himself few, if any, are more bizarre than the grand conceit Salvador Dali designed in a burned-out theatre in his birthplace of Figueres. A little more than an hour north of Barcelona by local bus, Figueres is a modest, not especially interesting town of some 35,000 people. But it is the...
> culturalelsewhere/1785/salvador-dali-his-museum-in-figueres-the-disneyland-of-the-disturbed/

Out here in this bleached-brown landscape the wine is fine, and so are the views. Gazing across the rolling Yarra Valley less than an hour from inner-city Melbourne, the eye can take in columns of grape vines marching in orderly lines over low ridges, expensively manicured golf courses, and huge steroid-expanded homes running to many millions...
> culturalelsewhere/1846/tarrawarra-gallery-in-the-yarra-art-in-the-landscape/

An intimate relationship between creative people may be as volatile and destructive as it can be productive and rewarding. And almost inevitably one partner, for reasons of success or force of personality, can dominate at the expense of the other. This illustrated collection of nine essays (which eschew the obscurantism of much academic...
> writingelsewhere/1978/between-the-lives-partners-in-art-edited-by-deborah-shepard-reviewed-2005-lives-in-the-margins/

Pain. The word rings like a refrain in any discussion of painter Frida Kahlo. Her pain is writ large on the pages of even the most meagre of biographies: the crippling polio at age 6; the horrific bus accident at 18 and the more than 30 operations she endured as a result; the emotional wounds in her marriage to the great Mexican muralist...
> culturalelsewhere/2059/frida-kahlo-1907-54-the-artist-as-subject-the-pain-and-passion/

More than a documentary about the great Amerian artist Chuck Close -- whom we see work on an astonishing self-portrait during the course of the filming -- this remarkable, revealing and important film weaves in the work of many of Close's contemporaries (Richard Serra, Robert Storr and others) and has friends and longtime colleagues (Philip...
> film/3563/chuck-close-a-doco-by-marion-cajori-madman-dvd/

If only the moment could have been frozen in the lens. It resonated with meanings. The heavily bearded Aboriginal man -- unsteady on his feet and the cuffs of his worn jeans caked red with dust -- stands outside a gallery of Aboriginal art in Alice Springs. Through glazed, yellowed eyes he stares silently into the air-conditioned room...
> culturalelsewhere/3830/australian-aboriginal-art-2011-the-state-of-the-art/

When Colin McCahon went to Sydney in 1984 to attend an exhibition of his work the attritions of alcoholism and that intensely personal religiosity he explored had taken their toll. He had given up any meaningful painting two years previous and was just three year short of death at age 67. In a bizarre but telling incident, he went into a...
> writingelsewhere/4369/dark-night-walking-with-mccahon-by-martin-edmond/