So there were a few little things I left out of yesterday's double-header post, either because I'm getting old or because I was trying to remember two days' worth of stuff at once. Or both. Anyway, here's what I missed.
Massages. Our hotel is right across the street from the Zen Day Spa, which has been calling my name ever since we got here. So we went on Friday. Ahhh...
Cemetery. Forgot to mention that about half way along the Cliff Walk, there's a beautiful old cemetery overlooking the water. Some of the graves were a little overdone, with huge stone angels and gigantic crosses (honestly, dead people, who are you trying to impress?), but all in all it was a lovely and contemplative spot. Some sample contemplations: Well, at least if you're buried here, you have half a chance of the kids visiting. Also, some developer is looking at this superb piece of real estate and weeping his eyes out.
Art. Right next door to our hotel is a gallery selling modern Aboriginal art: The Artery. This is where we got the pair of Aboriginal paintings last time we were in Oz three years ago --- if you've been to our apartment, they're the ones hanging on the back wall of the dining room, and they look like this:
They're by Jeannie Petyarre, from Utopia in the Northern Territory, and you can read a bit more about her on The Artery's blog.
Native Australian artists usually paint just one subject, which is often a personal totem or tribal dreaming (roughly, story) that is meaningful to them. When we bought our pair, we were told (as it says on the blog) that Jeannie paints the bush medicine plant. For the record, the bush medicine plant looks like this...
...so we figured that our paintings were stylized depictions of the leaves. On yesterday's trip to the gallery, we saw a number of new paintings by Jeannie, but they were labeled as bush yam flowers. Huh?
Again for the record, the yam flower looks like this...
...which means that our paintings are actually depicting flowers, not leaves. We asked the gallery owner about it and she told us, a bit sheepishly, that there had been some miscommunication --- she'd honestly thought that Jeannie was painting the bush medicine plant, but on her last trip to Utopia buy art, Jeannie insisted that it was yam flower, and had been all along. Whatever. I love the paintings for how they look, not what they're depicting, especially all their motion and the gorgeous colors spilling off the edge of the canvas. I think they look a bit like feathers, or waves in water, and don't really care if they're flowers or leaves. Plus, without getting all fuzzy and relativistic, it's probably a bit hard to translate Aboriginal stories and totems and ideas about art and depiction into something simple that will sell. Also, we don't want to impose our Western ideals, and all that.
So whatever the paintings are called, we love them, so we went back to see if Jeannie had anything new and to browse through the other stuff. Jeannie is still doing her bush medicine/yam flower canvases, although now in somewhat smaller sizes, and while I still love them, there were some stunning pieces on display from a new artist. Check it out. It's hard to see from the photos, but the paint is iridescent, which makes all of the dots shimmer and really enhances the mesmerizing spiral pattern.
The artist is Rex Winston Walford, and he has a very interesting story, which we got from the gallery owner who represents him. He's Aboriginal, but he was adopted by a white family as a toddler and grew up without knowing his birth family. He knew that he was adopted, and his adopted parents told him that they would help him to get in touch with his Aboriginal family if he wanted, but he had no interest until he turned about 40. I don't remember what sparked the sudden change, but he did search out his birth parents and get in touch with his Aboriginal family and his indigenous heritage. Soon after that, during his rounds as a garbage collector, he found some paints that someone had thrown out and started experimenting with dot patterns, which are a big part of traditional Aboriginal art. The gallery owner made a big deal of this fact, that his culture was somehow in his blood, but not being a Lamarkian I favor the slightly different interpretation that he's blending what he knows about Western and Aboriginal art in a new way. Anyway, Rex's paintings are of the Milky Way dreaming, and he did one just like the one on the website, but smaller and in a gorgeous shade of purple. We didn't buy it yesterday but we probably will on Monday now that I've had a chance to sleep on it.
In closing, happy belated Fourth of July!
No comments:
Post a Comment