art - Sounds like wish

11 July, 2013

I spy with my little eye

Marianne from East of Málaga asks
what can I spy
and what is my point of view?
I spy with my little eye
a window I can’t see through:

One of the stained glass windows by Leonard French in the National Library of Australia — One of 16 stained glass windows by Leonard French in the National Library of Australia

Bottom panel of a stained glass window by Leonard French, National Library of Australia

The glass is about 20cm thick, hand-chiselled and set into pewter-coloured concrete. The artist is an amazing Australian, Leonard French, who made 16 of these windows for the National Library in 1967. They are all visible from the foyer of the library through the interior plain glass walls of the café and the bookshop. The windows on the side of the building receiving the morning sun are in warm colours, those you see here decorating the walls of the café. On the other side of the foyer, the afternoon sun side, the colours are cool blues and purples filling two walls of the bookshop. French had a philosophy that art should be accessible to the masses and not just for viewing, a philosophy which makes me happy every time I sit at a window table in the café (I’m a little less happy when they’re all taken.). The chiselled edges of the glass are not sharp. I know this because I like to stroke it. The sun shining on the glass makes it glow and makes it warm to touch, but not hot. A spirit-lifter.

As part of the photo challenge, Marianne suggests we recommend two blogs. Two come to mind immediately: The Wanderlust Gene and Covetotop. Their blogs don’t just have interesting photos of faraway places, but more importantly for me they are well-written. I’m always on the lookout for readable writers.

16 February, 2013

Weekly photo challenge: Kiss

A photo. Of a painting. Of a kiss. A 1940s kiss.

From my father’s drawing book.

2 December, 2012

Ailsa's travel photo challenge: Hot

Ailsa wants to warm up by looking at photos of hot things: http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/11/30/travel-theme-hot/

Here in Canberra the temperatures have been in the high 30s lately, but rather than shooting this summery city for the photo challenge, I’ll draw on my father’s pictorial resources from Egypt.

A photo of a kind of swimming competition in the river – it looks a bit painful, and I’m not sure how you win:

And a drawing of soldiers under the blazing desert sun, probably up to no good:

22 July, 2012

Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside

Why pose outside when you can pose inside and pretend to be outside?

Here’s a great illustration of Orientalism: a European model imagined as an Arab. Exotic oasis with odalisque. Orientalist photography and painting were born from European colonisation of Middle and Far Eastern countries. Artists and photographers at the end of the 19th century and up to the Second World War years produced paintings and postcards depicting exaggeratedly different and exotic females both in and out of the studio. Outside the studio, photographers captured images of women who were mostly covered. In the staged setting of a studio, women were mostly uncovered, and it’s these photographs that express a Western male’s fantasies of penetrating the harem, in a scene which could be created with actual North African women or, as here, with a European model posing as an odalisque (a female slave or concubine). The images say more about the colonial perspective than about Arabs: the men were seen as enviable sheikhs with many wives and concubines and the women were often painted as belly dancers whose sole occupation was to entertain and satisfy men. We, the Western viewers of these images, both men and women, were convinced, by the contrast, that we were civilised. Except, this is an image my father obtained in colonised Egypt while fighting in a six-year-long war between civilised countries.

Odalisque – Orientalist photography, 1930s/40s

2 July, 2012

366 unusual things: days 179 – 183

27th June – Rode my bike home in the twilight. Have only ever ridden in daylight.

28th June – Read that looking at an old painting by candlelight shows us what the artist saw before studios were lit electrically. I have only one real painting on the wall; I started it but never finished it, but it became something better when I held a candle to it.

29th June – I have sons who wake up on one date and go to bed on the next.

30th June – Heard that J.S. Bach had 20 children to 2 wives. Eleven of them died within his own lifetime.

1st July – This is the date when I remember meeting my husband (31 years ago), conceiving our first child (4 years later :-)), and starting this blog 6 months ago.

30 June, 2012

Ailsa's Travel photo challenge: Art

Ailsa from http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/06/29/travel-theme-art/ proposed this week’s theme. Thanks Ailsa!

This is Millie. I’ve been tutoring her once a week for a few years and now she has travelled to Sydney to take part in a special program to learn to read.

Millie and I have something in common: our Dads both like to draw and paint. This week, instead of showing you my father’s art, I want to draw attention to Stewart McDonald’s art.

He draws like this:

And he paints like this:

StewartMcDonaldUntitledF — Stewart McDonald, “UntitledF”, ink on Fabriano paper

You can see more, and perhaps even buy originals or prints of his works, here:

http://www.redbubble.com/people/stewartmcd

15 May, 2012

Weekly photo challenge: Blue

My submissions for the weekly photo challenge usually come from my father’s war album filled with black and white images. So, in that album I find nothing blue. However, in his sketch books, while he usually favoured green (don’t know why), I found this painting of a seascape with blue sky and blue sea. It’s a photo challenge, so I submit this, a photo of a painting. Before photographing it for this post, I had never noticed the edge of a sunset on the horizon. Nor the signature on the right.

I did, however, submit a photo of real life for the unofficial challenge by Ailsa (see my previous post).

REB_seascape — R.E. Bruce, untitled seascape, c1939, © Patricia Worth

14 March, 2012

Contrast

Contrast is the theme for this week’s photo challenge, but it made me think also of contrasting experiences. The poems in my father’s poetry book demonstrate strong contrasts between the life he had led at home in Australia and the life he was struggling to endure in North Africa in 1941/42. Here are the first verses of two poems he recorded that show the difference. I have transcribed the poems (below the images) in case his handwriting is unclear.

The first poem was written by Pte. L. Partridge (NX2196) and was published in the A.I.F. News, 20th December 1941. The Tweed River forms part of the border between the states of Queensland and New South Wales. The countryside and coastline south of the river are fertile and scenic and would well be missed if one was on the other side of the world in a war zone. My father spent a lot of time fishing along this coastline.

The second poem was written by a soldier in Tobruk, a town in Libya which was taken from the enemy by the 2/15th battalion of the A.I.F. (Australian Imperial Forces) at Easter 1941. It was Germany’s first defeat in WWII (Tobruk’s Easter Battle 1941, John Mackenzie Smith).

*The Shell at Dusk,* written by a soldier in Tobruk, Libya, 1941

Springtime on the Tweed

Far away my fancies wander
And in wayward dreams they lead
Out across the blue seas yonder
Where it’s springtime on the Tweed.
There are scrub-clad hills surrounding
The river’s emerald sheen,
Crops of corn and cane abounding,
Wondrous shades of brown and green.

The Shell at Dusk

A flash in the sky, a distant roar
The awful approaching screaming whine,
You drop on your face, in the dust once more
And curse the Hun and his 5 point 9.
She bursts to your left where Fred went to ground,
You’re deaf as a post and covered in dirt,
Hot jagged shrap has whistled around
And that one’s gone, and you’re still unhurt.

29 February, 2012

Indulge

After reading that Shepheard’s Hotel welcomed British Army Officers but not ordinary troops, I thought of this poem that my father wrote. These are his thoughts after an attempt to indulge in a few drinks in a cabaret. The poem is several pages long; here are three of the verses. My transcriptions appear below the images.

Seven Days’ Leave

The digger grinned as he heard his name
They were dishing out the pays,
Next thing, he gave a hearty shout,
He’d got leave for seven days.
That night for him was sleepless,
He couldn’t help but think
If he’d see the sights of Egypt,
Get in a game or drink.

*****

About the town of Tel Aviv
He wandered for a while,
Looking for a lair-up pub
Where he could spend his pile.
He came across a cabaret
But ’twas “For Officers Only”,
He felt a little homesick then,
Almost a little lonely.

A man’s got a ton of bloody dough
And can’t get a bloody drink.
“For bloody officers only” thought he,
Wouldn’t it strike you bloody pink.
After hours of solid searching
And of pests all out to sell
He came across a cobber,
“With him”, he’d been thru hell.

18 February, 2012

February photo challenge: 18th Feb, Drink

A bit of research on Google revealed that this ad for Abbots Lager was painted near Tobruk, Libya, in January 1941 by the 6th Division of the Australian Army. (‘Journey to Tobruk: John Murray – Bushman, Soldier, Survivor’ by Louise Austin).

My father wrote under the photo: ‘Australian beer is best’.