Mothers Day 2011

Today is Mothers Day, at least in Australia. Dot received a large van Gogh-like bouquet of flowers from Em and Beck. I use that description purposefully because the tulips were in the artist's favourite colour, yellow and the rest of the bunch were Irises, just as in one of his most famous paintings completed while he was living at the asylum at Saint Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the last year before his death in 1890. That painting is now supposedly at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, but you could be mistaken for thinking that it's in our dining area!

While we've been talking about illusions, I'll pop a question. I presume most of my readers have visited some of the world's famous art galleries like, for example, the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Pompidou Centre, the Tate Gallery (and the Tate Modern), the Rijksmuseum, the Uffizi, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or the Hermitage in St Petersburg. I've visited them all. Well, the New England region stages a great art display once year, though perhaps not quite in the same league. Have any of you heard of the Currabubula Art Exhibition, now in its 48th year, which donates receipts to the Red Cross? Well we headed off there today, a round trip of about 280km from Armidale ... about 90 minutes away. Currabubula is hardly a global metropolis! In fact it's a tiny place. The whole district - including farming population - had only 389 residents in 2006. I doubt if the village is home to more than 200 people! The picture shows the main street of the CBD - actually it's just about the only street of any importance.

The exhibition is shown in the small village hall, not ideal conditions. And the artists are probably not household names like Leonardo, Rembrandt, Monet or Picasso, although their works were produced all over eastern Australia. Less convenient still, the organisers managed to hang no less than 667 work on the hall's walls and on temporary display boards placed in the middle of the narrow building. Needless to say, the pictures were crammed in as my own exhibits show below! When we got there in late morning, there must have been upwards of 150 people in the hall - it's a very popular event. So it was difficult to stand (or sit) in any comfort in what resembled a densely packed scrum. Most galleries have abundant space for their displays and some, like the Rijksmuseum's display of Rembrandt's Nightwatch, have rooms housing just one work with tiered seating to view critical works in relaxed comfort.

Most of the works were technically competent, and some showed considerable creativity in design or use of colour. However, the most prominent genres were Australian rural landscapes, animals (horses, sheep and poultry), and Parisian or Venetian street scenes - the former painted on rainy nights! No great blobs of colour here, or deformed women, or anything quasi-scientific like the decaying cat I once saw on video at the Tate Modern. Oh well, it was fun seeing an event we'd long heard about but never visited.

AS