AMILTON D E S I G N G L A S S The artwork of Jeffrey Hamilton

Clare Belfrage @ Sabbia

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Internationally renowned glass artist Clare Belfrage has a new solo show currently on display at Paddington's Sabbia Gallery. These works are a lovely iteration of the subtle and refined beauty for which Clare is known. These beautifully formed vessels are full of grace. The delicate almost-matte surfaces absorb light and contribute to their quiet but powerful presence.

Drawing Out Time opened on Wednesday 15th Nov, with an address delivered by Gabriella Bisetto, Head of the Glass Workshop at the South Australian School of Art, Art Architecture and Design , University of South Australia. An accomplished glass artist in her own right, Gabriella spoke eloquently about Clare's work and the accomplishments of the Australian contemporary glass community.

Closing December 9th, this is a delightful exhibition and well worth a visit.

Camp Creative 2015

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On Thursday 8th January I loaded up the station wagon with glass, lead and tools from Australian Stained Glass Supplies in Leichhardt and headed North the next day toward Bellingen. I was booked to teach a group of 7x students the basic craft of leadlighting, aiming to instill a passion for stained glass; by the end of 5x days solid work I think I achieved that aim. Everyone enjoyed themselves and seemed to be pleasantly surprised by what they made during the week.

Camp Creative is held in Bellingen every year, with the whole town getting behind it. Around 1,000 students participate in everything from Chinese Calligraphy through Saxaphone and Drumming to making a fountain out of bamboo cut from the surrounding bush. Many students come back year after year, taking on different skills each time or pushing their previous course to new heights.

Greer Taylor @ Brenda May Galleries

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Contemporary sculpture of the highest order: Greer Taylor has trumped it with her latest show "out of rain" at the Brenda May Galleries in Dank Street Waterloo.

Down the Rabbit Hole

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White Rabbit Gallery is Judith Neilson's gift to the poeple of Sydney. And what a rare and wonderful philanthropic gesture it is! John McDonald writes glowingly of the establishment in the Sydney Morning Herald, and not for the first time. In an excerpt from the Director's statement Judith says: "We wanted to share with Australians and the world the best of Chinese contemporary art since 2000—a turning point that I think of as the Big Bang. I hope all visitors to the Gallery will experience the surprise, delight and fascination that the White Rabbit Collection's artists and their works have given the Neilson family."

Housed in a converted industrial warehouse, the gallery boasts 3x floors of the most diverse and fascinating artworks you could imagine. Every few months the owner, Judith Neilson, travels to China on a buying trip, collecting work from both well known and entirely unknown Chinese artists creating excellent work. Down the Rabbit Hole is a mix of mostly new pieces and work from the collection and is aptly named, as McDonald points out. It really is a journey into wonderland.

Sunday 10th was my third visit to Down the Rabbit Hole; I've been a regular visitor to the Gallery since its opening in 2009 and I'm now recognising some works in the collection. I found the current hang particularly uplifting. The 3x light sculptures are beautiful, lyrical works, engaging the attention for long periods of time. One in particular, which could not be photographed, produced quite profound images simultaneously evocative of planets and microscopy. And the workings of gradually shifting lenses and folded wire mesh were entirely exposed, immediately debunking the mystery of the whole artwork.

Scripting is accompanied by a meditative piano score, perfectly suited to an entrancing artwork.

I will finish this blog entry by quoting a rather poignant statement from the work of artist Liao Chien-Chung: "Part of aesthetics is getting rid of ugliness, reek, grime: art and life both depend on cleaning up." This accompanied the work Garbage Truck, mixed media, 2011- a full-size replica without the garbage.

NSW Parliament Plein Air Painting Prize and John Lewin at the State Library

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I spent a delightful few hours this wintry afternoon at two exhibitions in Macquarie St Sydney. The Australian colonial artist John Lewin is being showcased at the State Library of NSW in a huge exhibition of his work. Lewin is considered to be the first Australian professional artist, with a keen eye for seeing the natural world as it is and the skill set to convey that vision into beautiful works of art. Lewin was collected by Governors and his works gifted to dignitaries around the world. With only a week to go (closing May 27th) this exhibition is well worth getting to.

The detail in Lewin's works on paper is amazing. As a former artist for Taronga Zoo I know just how difficult it is to portray a platypus as an interesting artwork. As for wombats, they have no shape at all! But it is John Lewin's portrayal of the Doryanthes Excelsior (Gymea Lily) and Telopea (Waratah) which are the standout works. They are stunning illustrations of beautiful plants. And the naturalist's detailed pencil drawings of the plant's segments at the bottom of each picture give the works an interesting context and depth.

Just next door to the State Library is the NSW State Parliament. The 2012 Plein Air Prize for Painting is the 5th such prize and makes for a beautiful exhibition. Some well known names are included, such as Tom Carment, Geoff Harvey and Guy Maestri. I absolutely love Tony Hulls' "Looking South from Coledale Hills" and Rachel Ellis' "Eglington Landscape 11" which was Highly Commended. But the stand out for me was Amanda Penrose Hart's "Hill, Sofala NSW". Hart captures the essence of the Australian landscape with economy and verve, her vigorous painting technique enlivening the canvas with dark passages of eucalypt leaves dancing across the composition.

UPDATE: The NSW Parliament Prize for Plein Air Painting held its last exhibition in 2018.

I was lucky enough to walk in on an artist's talk by Brigiat Maltese who made a most enjoyable presentation and spoke eloquently about the space that an artist inhabits while painting "en plain air". Her book, "Capertee Valley Diary", which was taken out of it's glass case for us and laid out on the floor of the House for close inspection, is made up of a continuous, concertinaed sheet with smaller pieces of paper collaged into the landscape to produce a beautiful panorama of the Capertee Valley, west of the Blue Mountains. Measuring over two metres long, the viewer's interest is maintained throughout the work. In fact one gains an insight into the artist's working method by examining the detail contained within the various sheets, produced over different times and lighting conditions

Outpost on Cockatoo Island

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For a start, Cockatoo Island has to be the grandest venue in the world for an arts festival. Set like a jewel in the middle of Sydney Harbour, the island is home to an industrial wasteland worthy of Mad Max #4. Enter the denizens of the streets, those artists who are reviled as vandals in the corridors of power yet weirdly in this case supported and indeed lauded by Maritime Services (Sydney Harbour Trust). Following hot on the heels of "Space Invaders" at the National Gallery in Canberra (now touring the country), and with Anthony Lister gracing the cover of the very final paper issue of Art and Australia Magazine, it could be said with some authority that street art, paste-up, graffiti, stickering, skate boarding, stencils, in short contemporary street culture, has moved centre stage. And a good thing too.

As well as Paste Modernism 3, there were many individual galleries on the island and dozens of boards erected around the cliff faces and outside the old warehouses featuring graf and artwork by many well known Australian artists. Numskull, Phibs and Beastman did a collaborative TeepeeTemple. There was also an enormous exhibition of screen-printed T-shirts dating back decades and of course lots of appropriately funky merchandise.

Out of all the amazing work on display at Outpost, what really inspired me, in fact blew me away, was Kid Zoom's installation. A Perth artist who moved over to Sydney and into Hibernian House for a time, Kid Zoom's career has skyrocketted and justifiably so. He is "possessed by a vision, by a madness, by a rage to live, by an all consuming fire to MAKE ART!" Ian Strange (AKA Kid Zoom) is so much more than a street artist: his multi-media installation Home on Cockatoo was worthy of a Biennale.

In the driveway to the house, which Ian built while living in the island, were the three vehicles which star in the video projected onto the inside wall of the house. With a deafening industrial soundtrack the piece was completely enthralling. The artist takes to the cars with a sledge hammer, jumping on them, pounding them with his feet... then begins overspraying them, with flames still leaping into the air and at one stage igniting the spray can: gripping stuff.

Sign of the Times

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Nov. last year a friend named Steve McLaren curated an exhibition at TAP Gallery in Darlinghurst entitled Not Only Black and White. It was an interesting theme to work to and I got excited and began a new collage/mixed media work on a black background, working with shades of black and all the various grades of white. The meta-meaning of gradations of black and white in a moral sense came to the fore as I was working with the piece. The exhibition came and went (I hung several pencil and charcoal drawings) and the new work languished for a time, until Brendan Penzer's call out a month ago for submissions in At The Vanishing Point's annual "show of the year", entitled Sign of the Times.

The image below is the result. Quite rich in content it engaged members of the audience for long periods, which is about as much as you can ask of an artwork at an exhibition where there is lots going on; ATVP's shows generally comprise a substantial performance component and are quite significant events. UPDATE: ATVP in Newtown has closed.

It constantly amazes me the diverse ways in which artists will interpret a particular theme. I was very taken with the two posters of an atomic explosion over Marshall Island, by Jason Wing vs Mini Graf, superimposed with the words "REFUGE ISLAND".

Ganbeld Lunaa presented a wonderful mixed media work entitled "Endless Bullshit Cassette Series" comprising a series of cassette tapes bound wildly in wire and screwed to painted canvases. I recognised a sympathetic sensibility of materials here, combined with a very Dada aesthetic. Each tape was labelled in various modes of bullshit.

The main gallery contained three sets of sculpted busts on plinths; the most prominent being, of course, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott in painted reinforced latex by Kassandra Bossell (below): an impressive likeness and eerily disturbing. Shown above is a wonderfully lighthearted installation that appeared on the awning of the gallery over King St. creating new meaning from truncated signage. And just inside the gallery door, down on the floor, was a delightful altar piece by Coris Evans set up on an amplifier and two speakers with looped chanting filling the gallery space.