"Satiation is no longer a dream"

Calling all Art Lovers

"For the art hungry who are feeling the cold fingers of cultural starvation gnawing at their vitals, satiation is no longer a dream. Melissa Sharplin has popped up like the genie from the lamp to show the world her latest exhibition "Swit Swurl" held at Archibalds Audi showroom. Wrapped in a dress by Gillian Melhop, Melissa, looking gorgeous, almost competed with her own paintings."

from CC: See and Be Seen, issue 9, 3 December 2010, p.8.


More art writing like this, please. I shall get on to EyeContact about it.

Lino Types

There was news of an interesting cultural discovery the other day in Canterbury: the old coat of arms of the University of Canterbury, designed by the artist Bill Sutton and made in lino by Sutton and his students from the School of Fine Arts in the 1950s, has been painstakingly restored by conservator Emily Fryer after being found in a shed.


The shed, on a private property in Eyrewell, was believed to have been constructed from part of a pre-fab in which the art school was housed at the Ilam campus (the art school was famously the first department to move from the town site, and the last department to receive its own purpose-built accommodation).

Here's a photograph of the original building, after the catastrophic fire which gutted it in 1975:


And an image of one of the lecturers' offices (more photographs at Digital NZ):


In its restored state, the coat of arms includes a burn mark, presumably dating from the art school fire. It seems to have originally been designed by Sutton for the floor of the art school's entrance, and was superseded in the early 1960s when the University became autonomous and changed its crest. Thereafter it's been lost and found a few times over the years in various sheds around the university campus, but following its restoration is going to be formally accessioned into the University's art collection, and is likely to be set into the floor in one of the new buildings at the Ilam campus. It's good to see the university treating its own art history with such care and seriousness, and I'm looking forward to seeing the coat of arms when it's exhibited later this year.

It reminded me a great deal of the similar crest set into the floor of my old high school, featured in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures. As I remember it, the shot showed the girls' lisle-stockinged legs and clumpy brown shoes flowing like water around the crest: they were forbidden to tread on it, as were we, forty years later. (So of course everyone did walk over it, whenever they could get away with it.) I don't know who designed and made Girls High's one, which is still set into the floor in the old building, now used as a community facility: the ribbon is nice, but it certainly doesn't have the attenuated elegance of Sutton's design for the university. Wisdom and truth girls, wisdom and truth. And get your dirty great feet off the crest.


Image from Heavenly Christchurch.

Cultural Fogeyism

Frances Hodgkins, Pleasure Garden, 1932, watercolour, Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu


The Pleasure Garden Incident -- as it's known to history, like the title of a novel Robert Ludlum deemed too fruity for publication -- tore a mighty rift through Christchurch's art world of the late 1940s.

Following Frances Hodgkins's death in 1947, the British Council sent six of her late works to the Canterbury Society of Arts for exhibition and potential purchase. Nearly three years of ridiculous argy-bargy ensued, as a battle was fought over the purchase of a single work, the Pleasure Garden. The progressive and conservative camps of the local art scene squared off against one another in public meetings and the correspondence pages of the newspaper, while the general public looked on with indignation and incredulity. The Garden City continues to use this method to conduct its cultural affairs: the Arts Centre's Heritage Carpark, anyone?

On the one side of the Pleasure Garden stoush were the go-ahead artists like Doris Lusk, Theo Schoon, Olivia Spencer Bower, Colin McCahon, and William Sutton, who wished the city to have the work. On the other were the keepers of what McCahon described in a vituperative letter to the paper as the 'three dead tombs of art' (the university's art school, the city's public art gallery, and the local art society); whose spokesperson, painting lecturer Cecil Kelly, suggested of Hodgkins's work that "The tone is not good. The colour is not good. And the composition is all over the place. A child could do it."

(Mind you, the progressive types were just as incendiary: one described the city's Robert McDougall Art Gallery as "a badly arranged museum of Victorian art ... that had died when photography came in", while another apostrophised Christchurch itself as a "curious and amusing backwater in the world of art".)

In yesterday's Press, Michael Vance looked at the incident in his 'The Way We Were' column, concluding that the row was not over one painting, but represented something much larger.

"It was the moment when cultural fogeyism, which had dominated Christchurch art since the colony's foundation, was first defeated, and, despite occasional stirrings, it has remained defeated."

And there we have it. Christchurch, New Zealand: free of cultural fogeyism since 1951.

The face of Jesus in my soup

This image appeared on the inside of the glass door of our logburner this evening, written in smoke.



Not wanting to make too big a deal about it or anything, but it did remind me quite a lot of this:

Jason Greig, Homer 2006, monoprint. Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.

I think I may have been back in Christchurch too long.