2018     

This year I will try to have in my blog each month something about art, some paintings, some stories.



                                                           *

December

I love going to art galleries. Looking at original paintings is wonderful. 

Special events like ’Art after Hours’, ‘Biennale’, ‘Sculptures by the Sea’ are very interesting and art in public places are fun.  

                   

                                                                                                                     
                                                           
                          2018 Archibald Exhibition / Wynne Prize     

                                                          


  SydneyMuseum of Contemporary Art 

                                                2013 

                                                                                                                     

Brett Whiteley, Sydney Art Gallery

                                                     Barangaroo, 2016

                                    

                                

                                

Yayoi Kusama, 2012 

Queensland Gallery of Modern Art 

    

                                                                                                                        Ai Weiwei

                                                                                                  Biennale 2018, Cockatoo Island

                                                                           Bondi - Sculptures by the Sea  

             

                                                                                                                                                                                      

2013                                      
                                                                                                                 always there

                                                                                                    

                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                  

                                                

                                                                                  
                                                                        Aboriginal Rock Carvings

 Bondi - Tamara Coastal Walk 







                                                                                 


                                                                                                                                                          West Head National Park

                                                          Berliner Wall - East Side Gallery

                                                              1316 m of Public Art

                                     
                                                                                                      
                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                
                                                                                             
                                                      

      

                                                                   

          Also ‘Opening Nights’ at smaller galleries are fun, especially if the artist is a friend or relative. 



Sheffer Gallery

           

                                                         

    

2010

                                                   2011

    Noosa Regional Gallery, 2015

                                      

                                                                                                *

November      

My father loved painting. He painted a lot, but he earned his living working in an office, he was a public servant. However, during the post-war years he put food on our table with his paintings. He copied romantic landscapes and got for the pictures a sack of potatoes, or cabbages, turnips, though never any sausages or speck.

As a child I loved sitting next to Papa watching how the paint on the brush slowly covered the canvas and the picture emerged.

When I left home my mother let me have a very small oil painting my father did of his grandfather.  

I also have a little print of a picture my father scratched onto a negative film strip. It is a self portrait when he was young with the Grim Reaper in the background. 

And what I value a lot is an image I surprisingly discovered in an art book I have of my fathers collection. He must have kept there a little drawing of himself between the front-pages for a long time.  The picture was not there when I got the book. And I only discovered this faint image many years later when I wanted to read the book from cover to cover. I think it is the sketch for the ‘Grim Reaper’ picture I have.  

I think only two of my father’s pictures are left. After my mother’s death no one took care of these things. Most of us children have moved away and the ‘old useless’ stuff was carelessly stored away, forgotten, lost.   

I wish some of his paintings we had on our walls when I was a child would have been kept, especially the portrait of his mother. That painting was once in en exhibition. Now this picture exists only in my memory.

                                                               

October  

We have kept many pictures our children and grandchildren made when they were little. 

I often hang them on the wall. Especially portraits are a joy to look at.  

                                       



Papi by Rowdy, 3 1/2 years                                                   

                                                                                                    

                                                                     Mutti by Rusty, 4 1/4 years

            

 Our Family by Ulrike, 4 1/4 years     

Maude by Maude, 4 1/4 years

                                                                  

                                                                           
                               
                                                                                                                by Cati, 6 years

Clown, by Tina, 6 years

       

September     

My father took me as a child often with him on his pushbike for a ride. One day we went to the very old part of Berlin. Quite a few painters with their easels were there, painting the quaint street scenes. I was fascinated to watch them paint, some with watercolours, some oils, others with chalk and some used only a pen. I could not decide which I liked best. Papa bought two of these paintings and I own them now. Not long after that day, the bombing of Berlin became severe and most of these beautiful old streets were completely destroyed. 

                                                                                                       

       

August        

I love having pictures around me. I put pictures I like on the big wall in our flat and  change them now and then, always enjoying to have something new to look at: some artwork, sometimes  posters of an exhibition, or pretty photos we have taken, even one of my scarves.   

And these are some of the many pictures I had on my ‘Art Wall’:

July      

 A few years ago my daughter taught me how to do linocuts.  

I tried it and did first a little simple flower. 

I wanted to do some more. I thought pictures with flowers would be nice, stories with flowers would be a good theme. 

I remembered a Dreamtime story I read long ago, Girraween. It is about a brave man who, after all the flowers had disappeared from earth, brought back the flowers for the people. 

And then more flower stories came to mind. 

An old Chinese woman carrying water in a cracked pot and flowers grew along the side of the path where the water leaked.

A poem by Goethe we learned in school about a flower being trampled down and passed away smiling

A poem by Wordsworth about dreaming of flowers he had admired when he was wandering some time ago.  

Remembering walking along the streets of a war-torn city and seeing a flower coming up among among the rubble.

A ballade by Henry Lawson praising the beauty of the bush.

I coloured the flowers in by hand. 

Later I turned the linocut prints and stories, 11 in all, into a little book for our children and called it ‘Flower Power’.