What has been great about the Edition Series is the random nature of it all. For a $500 annual contribution, I’ve received three random art works (with the fourth just about to arrive). I’ve had no say in the works, which has been a really appealing part of the project – the surprise element. There have been three limited editions prints, and one piece of porcelain. The works have all been very lovely, and I’m pretty confident they’re worth more than the $500 I’ve contributed. In fact, I know the Jason Wing screenprint has been selling at the price of $500 by itself.

And so it was a real pleasure to go to the 4A Members Exhibition with my friend Kate, and to see all four works on display. The other works were very interesting also, but I have a soft spot and fondness for the work of the artists I now have in my own collection.

He was within cooeee of the standout piece in the exhibition, the image of a naked, aged woman made out of latex (I assume) seated on a deck chair. In contrast to the young living man, the woman portrayed as very old, towards the end of her life. But she was still breathing, and if you looked closely you could see her chest rise and fall. In addition, the exhibition included lots of other “naked” works, all of them without hair/feather/fur.

“This is one of the best openings I’ve been to”, I told Aaron Seeto who runs 4A. And then I asked, “how much salt is there”, to which he replied “enough”. What was a traditional gallery space was transformed into something quite magical, with the entire floor covered in salt. We all needed to wear blue coloured shoe protectors as we walked around the space.

Unlike some exhibition openings where you see people sipping wine, chatting to people, and with their backs to the work, those attending this exhibition opening were actively engaged with the works. I spent ages and ages looking at the works. I watched the old woman breath. I even sneaked a peak at the naked man. Other people even poked the naked man to make sure he was “real”. He smiled, though it must have gotten annoying after a while.

Such is the case of Michael K. Chin. He’s a composer and DJ from Sydney who appeared at Parramasala on the weekend. He is doing some really interesting collaborative work with photographers. I like his music very much, and I like the way in which the music and the still images from the photographers he works with combine so well.

This first track is just fantastic on so many levels. Musically, it’s very interesting. Photographically, there’s much to engage.

The story behind the female vocal in the second clip is also interesting. She’s a Japanese friend of Michael’s who came to visit him in Australia. The song she sings is a song she learned to help her learn to speak English.

Closer to home, I really love this project he worked on about Hyde Park.

Mary by Adam Cullen

I spent the day visiting two of my favourite annual art exhibitions in Sydney “Sydney Life” and “The Blake Prize“. “Sydney Life” is a photographic competition and exhibition held each year in Hyde Park. “The Blake Prize” is a spiritual/religious themed art competition and exhibition held each year at the National Art School. They’re exhibitions I enjoy because they both challenge and entertain.

The Blake Prize, in particular, is a favourite. It began as an art prize for “religious art” in a fairly strictly Christian sense (I think) but has developed over the years to become a more general exploration of spirituality in art. Just about every year I’ve been, there have been a couple of works which I’ve found truly moving.

My favourite this year is a an untitled bust by Tim Silver, though I think it’s the beautiful craftwork involved more than the concept which fascinated me most. Sadly it’s not for sale. Also for the craft, there’s also a wonderful piece where a skeleton has been covered in plasticine and located in the cosmos, with lots of plasticine balls representing planets. And there’s a terrific work by Adam Cullen who has focussed his attention this year on Mary Mackillop.

Peter Morgan, Dinner of Kings - 9.25pm, Mrs Macquarie’s Chair – two taxi drivers enjoy supper before facing the hordes of Friday night revellers.

As for Sydney Life? There’s a lot of terrific works this year, though I wasn’t as impressed as I’ve been in previous years.

The most delightful work is – head and shoulders above the rest – the photograph of the pig at the Royal Easter Show. It’s a great moment in time, it’s well composed, and it has a great sense of fun about it. There’s also a wonderful photograph of a storm front coming over the harbour which is visually spectacular.

My favourite, though, was the image of two Sydney taxi drivers enjoying a meal in the back of a cab at night. I really like it, because it offers an insight into a really significant part of Sydney life (taxi drivers), but also because it’s so beautifully shot, with Henson-like night-time darkness. It’s a warm, lovely shot.

Hawkesbury Ends

“Which one of your children do you love the most?”, I joked to a couple of people today. They knew exactly what I was talking about.

We were in Newcastle for the “internal auction” (as we called it) of Hawkesbury One, an art collection group I’ve been involved in for the last ten years.

You may have seen articles about us in the papers or may have seen the recent story about us on the Art Nation on ABC1.

Ten years ago we were a group of friends and family members. A few of us knew a fair bit about collecting before-hand; others (including myself) knew nothing.

We had heard about art collectors groups in Tasmania, and so we invited a bloke called Dick Bett to come and talk to us about setting up a group with members in Sydney and Newcastle.

Since then, we’ve collected paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, all sorts of things, from well-known contemporary Australian artists, as well as artists who are truly emerging. Over ten years, we’ve also been through a wonderful journey of getting to know more about contemporary Australian art, as well as getting to better understand the dynamics of group decision-making. There were challenges and difficulties along the way, of course.

It was always going to be a ten year plan, we knew. People’s lives change, we realised that. But when it came to the actual point of having to divide up the collection and go our separate ways, I think most of us were unprepared for that.

Most of the group has been very actively involved in a broad range of things everything from choosing the works, giving the group direction, looking after the legals, maintaining a website and so on. We were emotionally involved!

And it was transformative for many of us to see the works we had housed in our homes over a decade go on display recently at Newcastle Region Art Gallery. To see all of the works together was quite moving.

I’m so pleased we had an exhibition at the Newcastle Region Art Gallery to end things. I think if we were to have gone our separate ways without this sense of “closure” it would have been far more difficult. Like ending high school, but not having a “formal”.

But when we had to make choices about which of the “children” we wanted to keep – and to compete against each other for our favourite works – I think most of us felt a fair deal of sadness.

As with any sad occasion, we tried to laugh things off with humour. A joke here. A joke there. A round of applause when someone was able to get the work they truly loved.

It’s been a wonderful, enriching experience for me to be involved in, and I’m so truly grateful my friend Kate asked me to be a member. It’s changed my life in many ways. A wonderful experience.

Long banquet table at National Museum in Stockholm

I remember being a little underwhelmed the first time I visited the National Museum in Stockholm. I recall thinking at the time it wasn’t very “Swedish” at all, with lots of European art, but nothing which told me much about Sweden. I’m pleased to say things have changed significantly in the last three years, and I spent most of the day there, with three main exhibitions.

The first I looked at was a silverware exhibition, with a large decorated banquet table the main focus. I couldn’t decide if the wire cage which surrounds the table related to the value of the collection, or was perhaps making a statement about the animalistic nature of the banquet, with chairs on their side. Perhaps it had an intended purpose, but ended up with another?

The second exhibition I looked at was called “Lust och Last” and it featured a broad range of eroticism – painting, sculpture, installation, video and photography – from the collection of the gallery.

Hermaphrodite statue at National Museum in Stockholm

My favourite work was a sculpture of an hermaphrodite. The body is reclining with its back facing you, though you can see the outline of breasts from under the armpits. There is a mirror, however, located on the wall behind the sculpture which allows you to observe the penis, and thus realise the complexity of the work.

He was an assman, I guess

There’s also a terrific installation piece of a headless man surrounded by papers and books, some of which had an erotic connection, others didn’t. Located above his head is a series of female torsos made from a very flesh like material (the same kind of material as dildos, or so I’m told). The work is called, “He was an assman, I guess”.

The same artist, Lars Nilsson also has a video work which features a woman masturbating in a darkened forest. The really interesting thing about the work was the stylistic similarity to some of Bill Henson’s work from a couple of years ago.

The third exhibition I looked at is called “Four Seasons” which consists mostly of 19th and early 20th century paintings of the Swedish city and countryside. There’s a couple of wonderfully romantic paintings of central Stockholm in snow (it’s amazing how little things have changed in 100 years) which I really liked, as well as some beautiful, joyful paintings of Swedish summer. I decided, by the way, I don’t like autumn. It’s not a very happy season, is it?

The museum also has a great section on design. As you might expect there’s some wonderful Swedish design classics, including some bent wood furniture, but there are also some wonderful prototype designs for televisions and netbook computers.

After wandering around for several hours, I spent a bit of time having a coffee and a brief look in the shop. Even though I had previously decided I wasn’t going to buy stuff here and take it back with me, there’s a couple of things I quite liked in the shop, including a clock that plays bird noises. How cool!

Hawkesbury One exhibition opening in Newcastle

For at least a year, we’ve been anticipating the showing at Newcastle Region Art Gallery of the Hawkesbury One Collection. This is the art collectors group that I’ve been involved in for almost ten years now. In short, we are a group of friends and family members from Sydney and Newcastle who have combined our resources to buy art which we own and share around our homes collectively.

Unlike other art collections which are ordinarily shown in art galleries, ours is a little different in that we’re not “patron collectors” and ours is not the result of curation by a major gallery. The collection is the work we’ve chosen over a period of time because we just liked the works, a point which most people seem to have understood.

After all that anticipation, the collection was officially opened this weekend, and will show until mid-September.

It was so exciting to see the collection presented beautifully on the walls of the gallery, to see everyone together with ear to ear grins as we celebrated the achievement we have made, and to have our friends and family around us.

It was also really great to meet some of the artists, including Arryn Snowball and Pamela See who had come down from Brisbane.

Overall, an exciting happy day.

If you’re in Newcastle over the next few months,you might want to pop in to the gallery to take a look.

Limited edition print by Jason Wing

There’s something very exciting about getting one of those “Australia Post Cards” in your letterbox, isn’t there? Sometimes you know what’s arrived at the post office, other times you don’t. This morning, as I went to the post office, it was a combination of both.

I was pretty sure it was an artwork from 4A Gallery, a Sydney art gallery that specialises in Asian and Asian-Australian art. But although I’d “bought” the work, I didn’t actually know what it was.

A few months ago I signed up for their “Edition” project, which they described at the time as…

It’s a subscription where four mystery, limited edition artworks get delivered to your door four times a year. You support 4A at the same time as developing a collection of Asian and Asian-Australian art. Edition is limited to 100 subscriptions, so hurry. $500 or $450 for 4A Members.

Great idea, eh?

And today I took delivery of the first of the four works. It’s a print by the artist Jason Wing.

Until today, I’d never heard of him. And so the first thing I did, after unwrapping the work, and enjoying it, was go online and read a little more about him.

The bio on his website reveals the following…

Jason Wing is a young Aboriginal artist from the western Sydney suburb of Blacktown, which has a relatively high Aboriginal population. Wing’s father is Chinese (Cantonese) and his mother is an Aboriginal woman from the Biripi people in the Upper Hunter region of New South Wales. Since graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Sydney’s College of Fine Arts in 1998, Wing has steadily emerged in the Sydney and national art scene as a versatile artist who explores issues of bi-cultural and Indigenous political identity, environmental awareness and spirituality with a street-wise flair (owing in part to his use of stencil printing) and strong commitment to community engagement.

So what did I think of the work?

I love it. In particular, the rich colours which, unfortunately aren’t all that well captured by my camera phone. I also really like the playfulness of the image. Combined with an excellent print on good paper, and I’m very, very happy.

I’m torn at this stage though between whether I’d like to put it up in my office at work or have it up on my wall at home. I’m leaning towards my office at the moment.

Next? Framing.

Opera Bar, Sydney

Sometimes the Opera Bar can be frustratingly crowded. In contrast to the “old days” when Opera Bar only attracted a handful of theatre-goers prior to an opening night, these days it’s usually very, very busy, especially on weekends, and particularly during summer.

Although my friend Colin and I had agreed to meet at four-thirty, circumstances ensured that I arrived half-an-hour earlier. And as I stood at the bar and ordered a glass of wine, I looked around and noticed things weren’t all that busy, and thankfully as I stood and waited for my glass of wine a nearby table with great views became free.

And that’s where we sat for the next couple of hours, enjoying a glass of wine, enjoying the view, enjoying the overhead heater, and enjoying a terrific meal. For the entree, we chose the Antipasto which was good, and for the desert, we chose the Pear Tart which was fantastic. Highly recommended. We didn’t worry about mains.

Minutes before the desert arrived, the light show commenced on the Opera House sails. I love the way the lights “played” with and imitated the patterns of the tiles, and then minutes later went kinda crazy with swirls and other wonderful patterns.

Later we wandered around and looked at some of the many light sculptures around Circular Quay. As much as the projections on places like the Opera House and Customs House are spectacular crowd pleases, so too are these wonderful sculptures. As well as being visually very interesting, it was great to see the wide-eyed smiles on the faces of young children as they interacted with these sculptures and had their photographs taken with him.

In the midst of a near-winter night in Sydney, it was great to see so many people rugged up, and walking around Circular Quay, enjoying this rather wonderful arts festival.