Another Quiet Weekend

We had a fairly quiet weekend but exciting in another way. We spent some time planning for Sue's 60th Birthday trip to France next May. The plan is to have her birthday dinner at L'escargot on rue Montoguiel where we ate last year and we both loved it. We'll spend two nights in Paris before hitting the TGV to Marseille for a couple of nights and then off to Saint Remy de Provence via the Luberon.
We hope to float up to the Loire to say hello to friends and pop into Chinon for a few nights before heading back to Paris and back home. This was inspired by having dinner with friends Friday night to chat about their impending adventure of living in France next year for six months.
So you can see, although the weekend was quiet, we have some future excitement on the way.


Planning for a holiday is very exciting.

RETRO RIDE on Saturday
I did get out for a ride on Saturday (doesn't he always, did I hear someone say) but this one was rather special. It was a RETRO RIDE. Now these days we have all sorts of modern lightweight bikes. My latest one is a carbon fibre frame with an 11 speed rear cluster giving me 22 speeds with the two front chain rings. Really this just confuses me sometimes but that's the way of the cycling industry marketing department these days.


THA BOYS with TOYS. Jet (on the left) has this pristine early Italian Colnago road bike from before clipless pedals and brake and gear shifters. Just lovely to another enthusiast.



My OLD bike that has taken me 1000s of kilometres of racing and training is now my single speed fun bike. It's been to France twice has been a wonderful travelling companion.

What really excites me are the older bikes and this was what our Retro Ride was all about. We dragged out our old bikes and our old cycling clothes - mine was from the late 70s. It was a mild winter morning with a low of 10 degrees, warming to about 17 and a clear sky over the Bay. What more can you expect on a winter Melbourne morning?

JOHN BRACKS - MELBOURNE ARTIST
The brown artist I call him............
With such a quiet weekend I wondered what we could post and as I did some surfing on the net and reading other Blogger's posts, I remembered John Bracks, an Australian painter who passed away before the year 2000. As an art student who was taken to the gallery with the class, I was intrigued by the Bracks paintings. They have an irony about them that appealed to me. Later I worked in the city at the Myer Emporium as a Display Assistant and later a Window Dresser, I think we call them a Visual Merchandiser these days.
Anyway, as I part of Melbourne city life, I saw a lot of what Bracks painted in the daily goings on in Melbourne.



Collins Street 5PM - 1955
I remember scenes like this from my first job. Rushing from the job and down to the station to catch the train.



The Bar - 1955.
Can you notice a similarity to a scene from a French Ipressionist's painting?
This was in a time when Melbourne had the 6 o'clock swill. The pubs closed at 6 PM and the workers would try to get as many beers in before they wandered off home for dinner.

Two Typists - 1955.
I get the impression that the feet above the heads of the Typists belong to the people in "Collins Street 5PM" with the men going off to "The Bar" for the 6 O'clock swill. Can you see the relation between these 1955 John Bracks works?



Self Portrait - 1955

Latin American Grand Final - 1969
Bracks later finally came out of his brown phase and started to add more colour - well it was the 60s and the 50s were so brown anyway.

Maybe the reason that Bracks appeals to me as an artist is that he painted everyday scenes that were from my growing up period of the 50s and 60s.
I don't claim to know a great deal about John Bracks (a real Melbourne boy), I just liked his work so I suggest if you'd like to know more, follow this link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brack

Having finished the weekend blog, I now need to pop off to mow the lawns and I think I heard Sue say something about vacuuming. See you on "Wednesdays in France".

Australian Impressionists

Its been a quiet weekend - except for Mother's Day with Sue enjoying lunch with her two boys, well men really these days (they are in their 20s). Reading through some posts of other bloggers over the weekend, it sparked a subject that I've lightly touched on in the past.
Impressionism. A style of painting that emerged out of Europe, and France in particular was an influence to some of our local artists.


Arthur Streeton - Hoddle Street




Arthur Streeton

Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Walter Withers, Fred McCubbin and Charles Conder are some of the artists that I'm more familiar with. Up at the Paris end of Collins street Melbourne in the 1880s were the studios of Roberts and Streeton. Needing to get out of the studio and into the environment, these artists initially travelled to our suburb of Mentone to paint. It was the summer of 1886 when Arthur Streeton met Tom Roberts at Mentone.
Later they established Artist's Camps in the northern hill area of Heidelberg, about 10 km or more from the Melbourne CBD. These camps evolved into what is now known as the Heidelberg School of Artists, our Australian Impressionists.


Charles Conder - Blossom



Charles Conder - Going Home



Charles Conder

 

Tom Roberts - Mentone Beach



The infamous 9 x 5 Impressionist's Exhibition 1889



Poster advertising the 9 x 5 Exhibition



The Buxton Rooms in Swanston Street where the 9 x 5 Exhibition was held.

 Their early exhibition held in Swanton Street Melbourne in August, 1889 was not that well received especially by one art critic who wrote a fairly negative critique in the Argus newspaper.

The modern impressionist asks you to see pictures in splashes of colours, in slap-dash brushwork, and in sleight-of-hand methods of execution leading to the proposition of pictorial conundrums, which would baffle solution if there were no label or catalogue. In an exhibition of paintings you naturally look for pictures, instead of which the impressionist presents you with a varied assortment of palettes. Of the 180 exhibits catalogued on the present occasion, something like four-fifths are a pain the eye. Some of them look like faded pictures seen through several mediums of thick gauze; others suggest that a paint-pot has been accidentally upset over a panel of nine inches by five; others resemble the first essays of a small boy, who has just been apprenticed to a house-painter.



James Smith, Argus, 17 August 1889



Charles Conder 9 x 5 painting with the typical wood framing.

 The exhibition became described as the 9 x 5 Exhibition. It took its name from the fact that all the paintings were based on the panels of a cigar box. Of the paintings on show at the exhibition, about one third still exist in public collections. In 2009, one of Charles Condor's 9 x 5s sold at Southerby's for just under $500,000. Not bad for a painting at an exhibition that was lampooned by a newspaper art critic.



Tom Roberts - By the Treasury




Arthur Streeton - Burke & Wills statue near Princess Theatre




Arthur Streeton - Residence of J Walker



Maybe I'll follow up with more specific Australian Impressionist posts in the future.

Rupert Bunny - Melbourne Artist - 1864 to 1947

I use to draw things as a child at home, later I would draw cartoons. Terrible at the more scholastic subjects, I went to art school, not that it did much good - although it did give me an appreciation of art and an interest in the Heidelberg School of artists. They were my favorites along with the French Impessionists.
A group of Australian Impressionist (late 1800s) initially painted in the Bay area of Melbourne (where we now live) before they moved on to the then rural district of Heidelberg. I grew up in this district and enjoyed riding my bike there as a teenager.

Rupert Bunny - Self Portrait

I was aware of Charles Condor, Walt Withers, Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, well known Australian impressionist artists, but not Rupert Bunny.
You can read more about the Heidelberg School artists here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidelberg_School

That is until I was driving down the freeway and saw that the Rupert Bunny exhibition was advertised. This Melbourne artist spent most of his life in Paris and areas of France during the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s.

Summer Morning

If you click on the link below a video will describe his career better than I can here.
A video of the Rupert Bunny Exhibition
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/events/multimedia/rupert_bunny

Last Fine Day

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rupert Charles Wulsten Bunny (29 September 1864 – 25 May 1947) was an Australian painter, born in St Kilda, Victoria.
Bunny was the third son of Victorian Country Court Judge, Brice Frederick Bunny, and Marie Hedwig Dorothea Wulsten. He travelled to England in 1884 and studied at Calderon's art school in London. After 18 months he went to Paris to study at the atelier of Jean-Paul Laurens. In 1902, he married Jeanne Heloise Morel, a former art student and model, who appeared frequently in his paintings. He lived in France until 1911 when he returned to Australia for a visit. For a number of years he travelled back and forth between Australia and France. After his wife died in 1933, he returned permanently to Australia and settled in South Yarra, Victoria.[1]

Dolce Farniete - Sweet Idleness

From the ABC website - http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2007/06/12/1949232.htm
Rupert Bunny is one of Australia's best known and loved artists, at the height of his career at the end of the 19th century he was living a life of success in Europe, befriending some of the most brilliant painters, writers, musicians and dancers of the day.

Returning from the garden

Dame Nellie Melba - Australian Opera singer. Her home in Coldstream, Victoria is about an hours drive from home. The area is in the Yarra Valley, home to many fine vineyards.

We still don't why we didn't get to the Exhibition that was held here at the time. We have missed seeing a great Melbourne artist's works. I have enjoyed researching through the above links and hope you had an opportunity to appreciate some of our Australian artists as well.

Art or Vandalism - You tell me!!!

Art or Vandalism, I'm not quite sure. 

In specific places I'm sure it adds to the color of the city. 

I've posted six photographs from my morning rides - the first three come from a recent ride in the Melbourne suburb of Balaclava. It's a predominent Jewish area with some wonderful pastry/bakery shops. I attend a weekly gym session here and enjoy a cup of the best coffee I've tasted anywhere before rushing off to work.

I'm not sure whether I should label these as graffiti or murals. 

The colors are intense and the graphics are very well executed. My initial thoughts are that these were probably comissioned.

What really gets up my nose though is the "tagging" on public property. I've seen tagging on someone's picket fence or brick wall. How does this property owner feel when they get up to go to work and there it is, some vandal's spray canned name across their private property.

Two years ago we were in Provence and there on the Pont de Gard was someone's name carved into the stone (from the 1700s).

Rome was worse!!!!!!!

I must say though, I love the intensity of color in these first three "murals".

The following three come from again my early morning rides, but this time, during 2007 in the streets of Paris. 
What is significant about these shots are that they contain my name. 

The tagging wasn't done by me (although Sue was suspicious, even after my denials) but I kept coming across "Leon" tagged in various steets on these rides.

I remember back in 1979 when I spent a summer in San Francisco, I noticed some grafitti that was AC/DC which I presumed was done by someone that admired our great Aussie band. Then again????

I'd be interested in the thoughts you might have on Graffiti.