Buying Art...

Saturday, 9/18/99

Well. A whirlwind week on the business side, with arrivals and unexpected departures, but when all is said and done, I'm still here. And uncertain as ever about when I'm coming home. I'm really starting to feel lost in the bush. It certainly helps to have Janet here, but even she feels she has seen enough of Sydney, and is tired of hotel living. We both miss the kids terribly and we miss our lives in general. Vonnie is doing a wonderful job of looking after things for us, but that is a huge burden falling on top of her first semester at SF State (and commuting at that, poor girl!). So we're thinking of sending Janet home early (she's scheduled to stay until Sept. 29) to help keep the home fires burning (without burning down the house). Me, I've been in the bush too long, and I'm scheming to get myself home as wellÉ If rollout is pushed back to November 1, as I expect, I should be able to come home for a couple of weeks and then return for the final training. That's a best case scenarioÉ

Sightseeing has been wonderful distraction on previous weekends: we went up to the Blue Mountains the first weekend, and then took the ferry to Manly last week. We had planned to return to Manly this Saturday to photograph the sunrise over the Pacific, but we discovered that the ferries didn't begin running early enough. So instead we slept in on Saturday morning -- indeed, sleeping off our Friday night celebration (eating and drinking cocktails in the piano lounge). Then, by the time we finished calling home and attending to laundry details, it was already afternoon.

We were still a bit melancholy about our separation from our beloved family and friends. Seeking consolation in our isolation from hearth and home, it came to me that we should buy a significant "souvenir" for ourselves. Specifically, I had it in mind to go shopping for a nice piece of Aboriginal art. This "sudden" desire crystallized a growing appreciate for this art, based on increasing exposure, beginning at the Museum and continuing through our visits to shops and galleries around Sydney. Of course, we have no budget for buying art, but Janet has long wanted some new art for our walls, and I thought this would be a rare opportunity to get exciting original work at very reasonable prices. Justifying the expense as an anniversary present to ourselves, I had little difficulty in persuading Janet to go on a serious looking expedition.

The attendant at the small gallery we happened into on Oxford Street last Sunday had told us of a larger parent gallery somewhere in Paddington. A flyer from the Aboriginal Art Centre in the Rocks (the shopping and eating district at the foot of the Harbour Bridge) also had a map to an Aboriginal art gallery in Paddington. I had no idea if they were different galleries or one and the same, but, armed with a map, we had a mission. After stopping for an undistinguished lunch at the foot of Oxford Street, we walked about a mile and a half out Oxford to the Paddington district. On one side of Oxford was a large walled compound that housed the Victoria Barracks and a military museum. Past the Barracks at the top of the hill was a large yellow Victorian building with a steeple tower that housed a library. Across the street were small shops and diminutive streets. We saw an Aboriginal art gallery, but it wasn't the one on our map, so we kept on walking, several blocks past the street we should have turned on, as it happened, because the streets marked on the map were so small (in real life) that I thought they were alleys. We finally found the right street and wandered through narrow streets on a couple of very residential blocks. The houses (or apartments) were quite small, but cute and quaint, many with wrought iron railings on second story balconies.

At last we came to an unobtrusive white building, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, housing the Hogarth Gallery of Aboriginal Art (http://www.citysearch.com.au/syd/hoggal). Now, as I noted before, this is not aboriginal art in the sense of authentic ancient artifacts, like Pre-Columbian art in Central and South America -- that kind of art is only found as rock paintings way out in the desert. Well, actually, I was told of a rock carving at Bondi Beach, which is in suburban Sydney, but the point is: the original Australians worked in media that were not readily transportable. The museum and the galleries show contemporary work produced by native Australians (not a term they use, but I use it as an analogy to native Americans) in newer media introduced by modern cultures.

At the Hogarth, we found an exhibition called Mina Mina (which is a sacred dreaming site 250 km west of Yendumu, Northern Territory). The exhibit featured Warlukurlangu artists who are from that area. Unlike most work we had seen to date, these were all acrylic on canvas. With wall-size works in gallery conditions, the power and beauty of these paintings was apparent. I was immediately drawn to a large vertical painting called Mirawarri Dreaming by Rosie Nangala Fleming. With this work I had my first tangible experience of the quality of shimmer in aboriginal paintings.

Depending on region and tribal groups, the artists have different visual vocabularies. For example, some favor a crosshatch pattern (used for both ornamental and narrative work) whereas others use intricate dot patterns as the basis for their renderings. There are visual conventions that represent people and animals and boomerangs and many paintings are based on intricate narrative stories detailing the Dreaming, but everything is rendered in symbolic and highly stylized designs completely unlike the representational art to which we are accustomed. The more accessible pieces appear at first to be like either crude folk art or intricate but arbitrary designs. Some of the work (especially fabric work, like batik) is purely ornamental, but the paintings are often narrative. As it happened, Mirawarri Dreaming was actually a landscape, and we began to discern more of the conventions of the art. This piece was only $2,600 AUD, well beyond our price range, of course. Down at the $320 price range we saw three canvases that left us unimpressed. But we remained impressed with the larger works and intrigued by Mirawarri Dreaming.

Tantalized, but priced out, we were going to leave when we discovered a second gallery. Here we found Tiwi poles. Carved by the Tiwi people on Bathurst Island off the northwest coast of Australia, these poles are set around the burial areas, both to honor the deceased and to protect their remains (or something like thatÉthey have them in the museum). In fact, they are a lot like totem poles, and for $10K we could have a really cool one in the hallway (there are, of course, lesser options, but why not dream big?). Here we also saw our first examples of bark paintings. Just as the name implies, these are paintings done on pieces of bark, ranging in size from small, paper-size sheets, through larger poster-size paintings, to huge wall size works. With the larger pieces, the bark is heated over a fire to soften it and flatten it; after painting, the are often in special museum-quality metal stretchers to help keep them flat. It is wonderful to see them loose, however, especially when you can hold them and appreciate the texture of the bark on the back and the interesting shapes they often have. On a mezzanine in the second gallery we found a smaller canvas that we both liked, as well as a very nice bark painting. Each was priced at $500.

Inspired, but far from willing or able to make impulse purchases at that level, we thanked our hosts and headed back to Oxford Street to check out the other gallery. Now when we started on this little expedition, I was thinking about screen prints and etchings that I had seen in other galleries, and I had a price somewhere in the low $200s in mind. Seeing the canvases and bark paintings, however, whetted our appetites for immediacy of the one-of-a-kind originals. Somehow the "budget" was getting more flexibleÉ

Back on Oxford Street we found the Coo-ee Gallery (http://www.citysearch.com.au/syd/cooee). The first floor looked much like many another souvenir place we have visited, with didgeridoos, boomerangs, etc. But we followed the sign upstairs to the gallery area, where we found an exhibit of work from the Tiwi people on Bathurst island (the same ones who carve the poles). Here they had a selection of works on the walls, but the space was smaller and the walls were crowded. They also had a large selection of unstretched canvases, prints, and paintings on paper displayed in plastic sleeves in large bins. Assuming the work on the walls was beyond our means, we gravitated towards the bins. We saw one small canvas that we liked and inquired about the price; it was $350, by the son of a famous artist. A larger canvas that attracted us was priced around $1000, but the owner suggested he could come down by $100.

As we continued looking through bins of prints, I saw the fellow from the other gallery, who had referred us to this place last Sunday. He was working on mounting something. I greeted him, and he remembered us and offered to take us to the stock room in the basement to show us more of their collection. Their stock room was filled with bins of canvasses and bark paintings, many that were removed from display to make room for the current exhibition. What a wonderful education we got! He showed us a variety of different styles and artists, pointing out details of technique and narrative. Again, we saw both canvasses and bark paintings that we really liked, but these were in the $800 range.

Although we were still attracted to the depth and tactile appeal of these media, our "art consultant" encouraged us to look at some works on paper from a recently "discovered" Tiwi artist. Her name is Estelle Munkanome, and we had actually seen (and overlooked) a couple of her paintings on our first pass through one of the bins. He brought out a couple of other small paintings of hers, and seeing the work as a body, we began to appreciate its significance. She works with the dot patterns that we had come to prefer, but her work is very different from the more "traditional" rendering styles to which we were becoming accustomed. This was one of the reasons we had overlooked it the first time. Of the eighteen works by Estelle that had come in on the last shipment, only these four were left. All four were attractive, but one in particular called to us, and, impulsive or not, we felt that it should come home with us. Excited by this addition to our art collection, we sought more information on the artist. Neal, our "consultant", told us that none of Estelle's paintings were titled or had associated narratives, as most of the paintings did. Indeed, she herself was something of a mystery. The gallery owner told us that Estelle is around 40, and she has only been painting for a couple of years, but her work has found immediate favor in the art world. Apparently she has some kind of physical handicap, but he wasn't sure exactly what it was. She lives in a community facility, where they are collectively cared for and a wide variety of art is produced.

The woman who organized the exhibition (and worked at the gallery) told us that Estelle is a Tiwi. She herself (the gallery lady) is leaving soon to go to Bathurst Island to live with her boyfriend there; she seemed to me to have some aboriginal heritage. She was eager to tell us of tours we could take to visit the island and see the culture first hand. You have to get special permission, though; almost like a visa to visit another country. A bit overwhelmed by our extravagance, we walked back to hotel in a state of excitement. We are thrilled by our new art can't wait to frame & hang it and share it with you.