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Angers danger !!! (at Le Quai)

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(Porte l'eau)

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Have you seen this man ??? WANTED - the Viennese Yeti Last seen drinking in an Höringer... (at Vienna, Austria)

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(Norska)

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Mount Misen, Hiroshima, Japan

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Michael Carini | As The Universe Falls Together | Acrylic on Canvas | 36 x 36

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Still looking for C'thuluh ! 🌊 (at Shelly's Beach Port Macquarie)

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Lighthouse beach, Port MacQuarie, NSW Australia 

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Gashadokuro, Shigeru Mizuki

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Sky blue - Wassily Kandinsky, 1940

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(Porte l'eau)

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Painting 1977 - Peter Booth, 1977

Oil on canvas

Mona 2005.030

Peter Booth imagines unparsable, unnavigable landscapes. The prospect is unwelcoming; and there’s no apparent refuge. We can’t even be sure that the figure here is a fellow human being. Is this apocalypse or nightmare? Booth offers us no title as a clue.

Some commentators have read autobiography in Booth’s subject matter. Born the son of a miner in wartime Britain, growing up in the blackened and blighted landscape of industrial Sheffield, arriving in Australia at 18, shy, once subjected to a traumatic attack, living with limbic epilepsy, he’s not had an easy life. He has, however, achieved both critical and commercial success as an artist. His art pleases. His handling of paint is dramatically exciting. His imagery packs a virtual punch. Subverting any conventional sense of pleasurable beauty, he wows us with the opposite: a supernormal pyscho-emotional hit that stays safely on the gallery wall.

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Dream of migrants - Qingson Wang - 2005

The staged nature of this photographic tableaux means something different here than it does in China, where photos are staged for the purposes of political propaganda.

The artist, Qingsong Wang, told me this in an interview I did with him in Sydney, during the Biennale, in 2010 (if you don't know what the Biennale is, there is a somewhat reduced chance that you're a total knob).

The audio from the interview is a little tricky to understand, so I haven't included it. Below is a transcription of one of Wang's more arresting observations, as told to me via the translator, who doubled as his wife:

He says the most difficult thing for everyone in China is everything changes so drastic, so dramatic, and you don’t have like a timeline, framework to adjust to. For example, you learn some virtues or good traditions from childhood, and then in your mid–high school you find out those were forgotten and should be discarded, and there came the new train of thoughts. And then in other adult years, something you learned, you just learn, adapted, become nonsense again. So all these drastic changes that occur to people’s mind was very disrupting and you find that your memories are always fragmented, something in your memory considered as good, would be like really evil things in the future life.

Wang's work is clearly a critique, oblique perhaps, of life in China. (Such a thing - that falsely monolithic entity - as 'life in China' remains utterly obscure to me. I can't imagine it at all). For this reason I asked him, 'But do you love your country?' and he said, slightly surprised, 'Yes'.

TRAIN OF THROUGHTS

BY ELIZABETH PEARCE

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Bookshelf - Adam Putnam - 1997

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Snowblind - Duncan Marquiss - 2008

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Untitled 5040 - Roger Ballen