Australian Literature Week 3- Visit to the NSW Art Gallery!

Wow, what a wonderful turn-out: so many enthusiastic, willing participants for our whirlwind tour of Australian art from earliest colonial times through to Brett Whiteley and beyond… Climaxing in that wonderful painted sculpture by Lin Onus, the fruit-bat bedecked hills hoist:

As I said about this image, it comes so close to being a perfect replication of the underlying intention in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance: here too is the amazing indigenous capacity of transforming ugly technology into a thing of beauty. Just as in Deadman it was Bobby’s capacity as a dancer that transformed the military dance of death into a dance that united people into a new life, so here, in Lin Onus’s work, the ubiquitous Hills Hoist, scarring the landscape of suburban Australia as far as the eye could see, is now covered in individually carved and painted fruit bats, complete with their droppings miraculously transformed into flowers! What a blast!

You all have your favourite paintings, so please visit the NSW Gallery database for images and more details about the works you found most interesting.

So, as said, the ideas, inspirations, images that you collected from your visit to the gallery this week can both provide some great subjects for your blogs, but will also provide you with some excellent material for your final take-home exam- so keep your images and information safely somewhere stored.

Blog topics for this week (chose any one topic, or make up your own):

1/ Present the image of the painting that most interested you and put it into words. Describe it in details, its colour, its subject, its story. You could even write a poem about it. Such a poems would be called an example of ekphrastic art. Click on the link to see exactly what this means. 

2/ Give a short narrative account (with a few illustrations – you can copy these from the NSW Collections database-) of your visit to the gallery yesterday: what did you learn, what did you enjoy most?

3/ Make a specific link between one or two of the paintings and Australian literature. Say what the painting is and explain how it helps to amplify your understanding of a literary work that you have been studying.

4/ Write a letter to one of the artists telling him or her how much you have appreciated the glimpse they have provided into their world. Grace Cossington Smith‘s Interior with Mirror might be a good place to start, but there are many artists to whom you could write such a letter.