Judging A Book By Its Cover Again.

It's time again for my favourite literary award of the year! You can keep your Pulitzers, your Bookers and your Miles Franklins: the Diagram Prize, for the year’s oddest book title, is the one I await with bated breath.

And this year the Diagram goes to … taa-raaaah! Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop!  Intriguingly subtitled: … and Other Practical Advice in Our Campaign Against the Fairy Kingdom. According to the The Bookseller magazine, the author, Reginald Bakeley, believes the prize "is a clear sign that people have had enough of goblins in their chicken coops." He added, "Our Campaign against the fairy kingdom continues." No doubt those of our members who keep chooks in the backyard, will be queueing up at Dymocks for their copy. 

At the same time they may want to buy The Art of Faking Exhibition Poultry:  a very useful read for  anyone who wants to know the techniques for faking leg colour, dyeing and bleaching plumage or inserting extra feathers. The knowledge might even be applied to the reader herself, thus saving the expense of a trip to the beauty salon.

The Book Depository ran a special this week on the books that were shortlisted for the Diagram Prize, and I have to say I was tempted by some of them.

As an inveterate tea drinker who despises the teabag-in-a-mug method and always uses a teapot, I would like to read How Tea Cosies Changed the World by Loani Prior. This is a sequel to Really Wild Tea Cosies. Who knew there was a secret life of tea cosies?

Then there are a few self-help manuals that might be useful: How to Tell If Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You, How to Sharpen Pencils, and How to Tell If Your Boyfriend is the Antichrist. I for one feel safer knowing these are available in my local bookshop should the need arise.

Vulgarity alert! Here I have to insert a warning that some of my Gentle Readers might find the next four volumes under discussion offensive: if you are reading this aloud to a refined audience, better skip the next few paragraphs.

How to Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer is a useful handbook for backpackers, hikers and campers. The blurb says it is essential and vastly entertaining reading for anyone who has ever found themselves in the wilderness without loo paper or a portable commode. What?! Who goes mountaineering without a portable commode? It's the first thing I pack.

Who Cut the Cheese? is another one for the scatologically-minded among us. To quote from the Book Depository website, "Jim Dawson sniffs out a load of historical and scientific fart tales, then offers the kind of fun facts you'll be dying to let slip at social occasions, in chapters like "Fart Facts That Aren't Just Hot Air" and "Gone with the Wind" (on famous movie farts). From fact to fiction to frivolous flatulence, this book is unquestionably a ripping good read."

How to Pee Standing Up is written by the rather disturbingly surnamed Anna Kevorkian and illustrated by Sara Schwartz. Do we really want illustrations? Those of us who have seen The Paperboy have already seen Nicole Kidman demonstrate the technique by peeing on Zac Efron after he got stung by jellyfish. Enough, already!

Still in micturating mode, we have Life of Pee, by Sally Magnusson. The blurb says: "Alchemists sought gold in it. David Bowie refrigerated it to ward off evil. In the trenches of Ypres soldiers used it as a gas mask, whereas modern-day terrorists add it to home-made explosives. All the Fullers, Tuckers and Walkers in the phonebook owe their names to it, and in 1969 four bags full of it were left on the surface of the moon." It actually sounds quite interesting and I might get the library to buy it!

Across Europe by Kangaroo is the story of an American family's odyssey - I suppose the title just means they called their hired van "Kangaroo", but I prefer to think of them bounding along the autobahns a-kangarooback, clinging on for dear life, with their luggage stuffed into the pouch. (Including a portable commode, just in case.)

When I hear the words "duct tape", I find that white vans, boxcutters and serial killers spring to mind. In every gory thriller and TV crime show, the miscreants rely heavily on duct tape and they always have a white van. Here we have a craft project book called Ductigami, by  Joe Wilson. Apparently you can make all sorts of useful items, from mobile phone holders to shower curtains, using only a roll of duct tape and a box cutter. All you need now is a white van and you can go into the kidnapping business. 

Flattened Fauna  is Roger M Knutsen's field guide to roadkill … very helpful for those of us who prefer to observe wildlife en passant, as it were. I imagine this book is to roadkill what Identifying the Birds of Australia is to ornithology.

Crafting with Cat Hair and Tea Bag Folding are two books no handicraft hobbyist should be without, and for the keen motorist, The Driver's Guide to Hitting Pedestrians will be the ideal Christmas gift.

For animal lovers, there are two companion volumes by Patty Brown: Is Your Cat Gay? and Is your Dog Gay? Among the "tell-tail" habits of the gay dog are: accepting doggy-bags only from five-star restaurants and obsessive grooming. It all seems rather intrusive. Where's the dog's right to privacy? I shouldn't think you really need to know if your dog is gay. Unless, of course, you fear that your dog is turning into a real bitch.

Finally, two very useful little books, consisting of postcard-size pictures of dear cuddly baby animals, each with a message. If you have to break bad news or answer awkward questions, let a ducky or kitty do it for you - that might soften the blow. Simply cut out the appropriate page and hand it over or better still, post it. The books are respectively titled Grandma's Dead: breaking Bad News with Baby Animals, and Why Is Daddy in a Dress?: asking Awkward Questions with Baby Animals. Very handy if you have to tell a child there is no Santa Claus or inform your married boyfriend that he is the father.

I feel the Diagram Prize Jury has done very well by us this year, and I am looking forward to next year's crop of The Oddest Titles!

Easter Eggs

This April it is appropriate to talk about Easter Eggs - those delightful little surprises that the Easter Bunny hides in unlikely places, for us to find. They are not always chocolate eggs either: they hide in paintings, movies, books and in your computer!

Google is particularly fond of hiding an easter egg to amuse the user who finds it. If you ask Google to define anagram, you get one! The list of results is headed by the message: Did you mean nag a ram?

Type into the Google search box Let It Snow , click "I'm Feeling Lucky"… and it does! If you type Google Gravity and click "I'm Feeling Lucky", Google succumbs to gravity and everything on the screen collapses and falls to the bottom.

Ask Google what is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, and it will tell you it is 42. OK, so it got the answer from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but still … Google knows 'the number of horns on a unicorn', and it knows 'what is the loneliest number'. Just ask!

Seinfeld fans will know that George Costanza's father invented a secular festival to replace Christmas: it is called Festivus, and the proceedings include The Airing of Grievances (so how is that different from Christmas?) and instead of a Christmas Tree, there is the Festivus Pole. If you type festivus into the Google search box, the Festivus Pole appears in the left margin.  Clearly the Google Guys watch a lot of Seinfeld.

As if you don't already waste enough time online, Google can surprise you with little games: If you type zerg rush into the search box and just click the normal search button,  the red and yellow letters O from the Google logo come out of the margins and start wiping the screen clean. You can shoot them down by clicking your mouse on each one until it dies. When they have all reached the bottom of the screen, the game is over, they form the letters GG for Good Game and you get your score.

One of my favourite Google surprise time wasters is the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. You know how that goes: every movie actor can be connected to Kevin Bacon in no more than six steps - for example, Marilyn Monroe's Bacon number is 2: Marilyn Monroe and Eli Wallach appeared in Making the Misfits;  Eli Wallach and Kevin Bacon appeared in Mystic River. Voila. Type any actor's name into the search box followed by the words bacon number, and see if you can find one that needs more than six steps to Kevin. I couldn't find one higher than three, and for that I had to go back to Leni Riefenstahl! Even Al Jolson is a two.

If you are using Mozilla Firefox or Chrome as your browser, type do a barrel roll into the Google search box, and the screen rotates through 360º. It doesn't work so well in Internet Explorer.

Wikipedia has one of my favourite Easter Eggs: if you type easter eggs (media) into the search box, you will get an article about easter eggs in the media, and the picture at the top right shows two bunnies and a hedgehog. Click on the hedgehog, the screen goes blank and a big basket of colourful easter eggs appear!

In the movies, Alfred Hitchcock is not only the Master of Suspense, but the ulimate Master of the Easter Egg, with his cameo appearances. He is even shaped like an easter egg!

His ingenuity was taxed in movies like Lifeboat, Rope and Dial M for Murder, where the action was confined to an apartment or indeed a lifeboat - no crowd of extras where he could hide. In Lifeboat, he appears in a newspaper ad for a slimming product, in Dial M for Murder, he is in a group photo on the wall; in Rope, we have to look through the window to see his portly outline in a red neon sign on another building.

Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein

Woody Allen hid a whole lot of easter eggs in his 2011 hit movie, Midnight in Paris. Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein, Toulouse Lautrec's Moulin Rouge posters, Dali's rhinos … any number of famous artworks are casually scattered here and there as part of the set. Among the characters we recognize Cole Porter tinkling away at a piano ("Let's Do It"), Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald doing the Charleston and a man trying to sell some paintings for a pittance. When you get a look at the paintings, you realise it is Matisse!

Corey Stoll plays Ernest Hemingway, and a lot of his lines come straight out of Hemingway's books. I suppose each viewer only picks up the hidden allusions that are familiar to him or her. I wonder how many easter eggs that I missed are hidden in that film!

All the biopics about artists are hotbeds of easter eggs. (Or hotnests?) Kirk Douglas paints his Vincents in Lust for Life; Charlton Heston beavers away at the statue of Moses in The Agony and the Ecstasy, but I suppose those don't strictly qualify as easter eggs, because they are not hidden.

Love is the Devil, the biopic about Francis Bacon, has many easter eggs in the form of scenes that are staged to look like his paintings, and will only be recognized by those who have seen the particular pictures.

In his bedroom is one of those old-fashioned dressing tables with the three mirrors. As Bacon's lover, George Dyer (played by Daniel Craig before he got his 007 badge) preens before the angled mirrors, we see the famous triptychs Bacon painted of him. 

Easter eggs in literature are easy to miss - an author's sly allusion to a current person or situation has a limited shelf life, unless it is about such a cause célèbre that it still resonates in the zeitgeist when the book is read years later.

M.J.Trow hides many delightful easter eggs in his novels, especially those Victorian detective stories featuring Inspector Lestrade. (Yes, he has hijacked  the Lestrade of Sherlock Holmes fame, brainchild of Conan Doyle.)  To quote only a couple:

"Beautiful car!" … "Yes, it's a Lanchester. I call her Elsa."

"Constable Marks! Make some tea, please. And send Spencer out for a packet of digestive biscuits."

I once read a forgettable whodunit (can't remember the author or title now, which just shows you) but I laughed out loud when the pathologist said: "I'll see you at the autopsy, Inspector. You know where the morgue is? 13 Miller's Court."  Now there's an easter egg par excellence! Look it up,  easter eggs are much more fun when you find them yourself.

Lots of artists put easter eggs into their paintings. Terence Cuneo, the famous railways painter, always hid a little mouse in his paintings. He was the official painter for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1952. There is a statue of him in the concourse of Waterloo Station in London, and a little mouse peeps out from under the painterly paraphernalia at the statue's feet.

Whistler liked to put a butterfly in his paintings. It evolved from his initials, JW. At the time of his bitter feud with Ruskin, he put a sting in its tail, and in the year of his marriage he added a clover to it for luck.

When the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was cleaned in recent years, the workmen on the scaffolding got close enough to see tiny cherubs making rude gestures - Michelangelo hid his irreverent little jokes by making them too small to be seen from the floor below.

The depiction of God and Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling is the most recognizable piece of Western art after the Mona Lisa. An article in The Journal of the American Medical Association opines that the figures and shapes portrayed behind the figure of God appear to form an anatomically precise picture of the human brain. Michelangelo's accurate anatomical knowledge due to his covert dissection of dead bodies is well known, so this may indeed be true. If so, it is an easter egg with a time delay: it had to wait for the publication of Gray's Anatomy to be recognised.



The Arnolfini Portrait - look at the mirror.

Some painters like to hide a self-portrait among the other figures in a painting: Velasquez in Las Meninas; Jan van Eyck in The Arnolfini Portrait; Frans Hals in the group portrait of the Civic Guard of St George, and Tiepolo in our very own Cleopatra's Banquet in the NGV, come to mind. There will be many others.

Van Eyck's selfportrait in the mirror

Hans Holbein loved an easter egg: the mottled, elongated oval that becomes a skull if you look at it sideways in the foreground of The Ambassadors, not to mention all the arcane items on the shelves between the two figures, that practically illustrate their whole biographies, for those who know what they mean.

I also like Holbein's Lady With a Squirrel and Starling. The sitter is Lady Anne Lovell. The Lovell family crest contains three squirrels, no hidden surprise there.

The easter egg is the starling: the family's manor house is in East Harling, which was commonly spelt "Estarling".

Gargoyles are part of the gutter system of a building - they spout water. Grotesques are small, bizarre sculptures lurking high up on the eaves and towers. The National Cathedral in Washington DC is adorned with 112 fearsome gargoyles, and dozens of grotesques, the most famous of which is Darth Vader.

Star Wars? Not very ecclesiastical, you say? On the contrary: in the 2011 census, over 70,000 Australians declared their religion to be Jedi.

May the Force be with you!

 

Smart Exhibition @ TarraWarra

Container Train in Landscape

The Jeffrey Smart exhibition at TarraWarra (near Yarra Glen) is still on until the end of March, and it is well worth a visit. At this time of year it is a pleasant day out: enjoy a drive through the Yarra Valley, visit the exhibition, have lunch at the gallery's café or at one of the many other places in the area where they cater for the tourists from the Big Smoke.

Jeffrey Smart with his last documented painting, "Labyrinth", 2011

Jeffrey Smart announced his retirement from painting last year - he is ninety years old, wheelchair bound and rather frail. He still lives in the Tuscan villa where he has spent the last forty years with his partner Ermes De Zan.

Container Train in Landscape (detail)

The works on display in the Gallery's three main rooms are nominally divided into three periods, covering the painter's sojourn in Sydney from 1951, Rome in the 1960s and Tuscany from the 1970s on.

He is an Adelaide boy, having grown up during the Great Depression in a small flat on South Terrace, after his parents had to rent out their suburban house due to straitened circumstances. From the flat he could look out at alleyways and back lanes, rooftops and little side streets: an urban landscape that fascinated him. The geometry of the buildings spoke to him, and he loved to explore these alleys and laneways with his friends after school.

Yarragon Siding

He became an art teacher because his parents could not afford to send him to University to study architecture. However, his fascination with the composition and geometry of buildings, streetscapes and industrial areas have made him a master of the urban landscape. His works emphasize clean lines and precise attention to detail. Chevrons, parallel lines and geometric curves are features of his paintings. The cubist patterns of apartment blocks are complemented by the coloured squares and circles of road signs at construction sites and airports, and his portraits are set in those backgrounds rather than the more conventional setting one would expect of a portrait.

Portriat of Clive James

 "Portrait of Clive James", for example, shows a vast expanse of bright yellow corrugated steel in the foreground, dwarfing a small, distant figure showing above the parapet of an overpass above. Clive James or Franz Kafka, who can tell?  Similarly, "Alma Mahler Feeding the Birds", shows a tiny figure in a red coat, who may or may not be Alma Mahler, standing behind a railing on what appears to be an elevated roadway, while seagulls wheel in the foreground.

Alma Mahler Feeding the Birds

David Malouf is shown at an industrial site, wearing overalls and holding an orange fuel pipe. With the line of windows in a background building rising out of the top of his head, his figure forms a vertical that intersects with the horizontal line of a row of multicoloured containers, while the fuel pipe describes a parabolic curve in the foreground.

Portrait of David Malouf

Many of the paintings have figures in them, but there is always a certain sense of isolation, that reminds me of Edward Hopper's work. The figure is often that of the painter himself (he has a bit of an Alfred Hitchcock silhouette!) In one painting, he has given his friend Bruce Beresford a cameo role, standing outside a row of garages, wearing a bright orange overall. I say "cameo role" advisedly, because his paintings have a theatrical quality - they give the impression of a stage set, with an actor hitting his mark. He likes a dramatic sky: looming grey clouds of enhance the theatrical effect, but at the same time they serve to focus attention on the structures below.

Bruce Beresford

I recognised Cahill Expressway, which has been one of the showpieces of the NGV these fifty years: a portly figure in a blue suit standing near the expressway on-ramp.

Cahill Expressway

 Whenever I go to see an exhibition, here or in another Australian city, something on loan from the NGV is always included. It just makes me grateful, yet again, that we live in Melbourne where we have unlimited, free access to such a wonderfully representative collection as that of the NGV. Whatever painter, school or genre is your cup of tea, you can go and enjoy it down St Kilda Road any time you like. Free of charge. Take the kids. Better than Disney.

Morning Practice, Baia

Another work that I liked is Morning practice, Baia, depicting a man on his back, balancing a cube on this feet. Sunlight floods the picture, which is, like many of Smart's works, almost surreal.

Container Train in Landscape

My favourite painting in that show was Container Train In Landscape, on five panels, each four feet long. This picture's home is the foyer of the Arts Centre, where I am sure most of  our members have seen it many times, but it was an unexpected pleasure to see it on a long white wall all by itself. The verticals of the gum trees reminded me of Fred Williams' work, but the bright primary colours of the carriages is pure Jeffrey Smart.

Labyrinth (2011), a metre-square picture, is Jeffrey Smart's last documented painting and is exhibited here for the first time.  It shows a vast stone labyrinth that stretches to the horizon, with a solitary figure standing in it. It evokes the painter's vision of that maze of back streets that he found so fascinating as a child. This return to the childhood experience that started him on his creative journey, may well be a fitting full stop to the Jeffrey Smart oeuvre.

Radiance: The Neo-Impressionists

I would urge our members to visit this exhibition, which is at the NGV International until 17 March 2013. There is a range of pointillist works on display: not only by the main protagonists, Seurat and Signac, but also by a host of other exceptional artists: Pissarro, Maximilien Luce and Théo Van Rysselberghe among them.

I particularly liked the works by Luce and I went back to look at them a second time. The colours are glorious. Théo Van Rysselberghe's portraits also stood out, as did the collection of sublime seascapes in the dazzling light of the South of France.

The pictures in this exhibition can never be seen to their best advantage in black and white, which is why you should enjoy them at first hand. Pay a leisurely visit to our magnificent art gallery: enjoy the Radiance show, have lunch, browse the art books and postcards in the shop, enjoy a cup of tea and a biscuit in the Members' Room, stroll through the Textiles Rooms on the top floor to see the display of beautifully designed ballet tutus. Go home with a smile on your face. It's as good as a couple of Prozacs and a stiff gin, and no side effects!

This exhibition is aptly named: the paintings are really radiant - they seem almost luminous. We are accustomed to the light and colour of the Impressionists, who obtained their effects by physically mixing the pigments on the palette. The Neo-Impressionists believed that to achieve the maximum luminosity of colour, it is necessary to present the pure colours separately and allow the viewer's eye and brain to blend them.

Georges Seurat founded the style of Divisionism, in which he divided shades of colour into individual dots of pure colour placed side by side. He took a scientific approach, concerned with colour theory. Divisionism developed into Pointillism, which is founded on the same principle, but is focused less on the pure technical aspect and more on the specific style of brushwork.

The reason why the pointillist paintings of the Neo-Impressionists seem brighter that those of painters who mix their pigments before applying them to the canvas, is partly because some of the white background remains visible between the dots, but mainly it is because placing the pure colours side by side on the canvas, avoids using subtractive colour.

This is where the technical colour theory comes in: when pigments are mixed, the resultant shade is achieved by partially absorbing (or subtracting) some wavelengths of light and not others. The mixed colour we see, depends on which part of the spectrum is not subtracted, and therefore remains visible.

Looking at the glowing pictures in this exhibition, the theory certainly seems to work! Of course, the downside of pointillism is that you don't have the brushwork that gives texture to a painting.

Another departure from the Impressionist way of working, is that the Neo-Impressionists eschewed the idea of painting en plein air, placing the impressions of light and colour on the canvas as the artist saw them. The Neo-Impressionists made sketches and drawings and they painted small studies which they then used to complete their paintings in the studio. In a way that brought them back again to the classical traditions shunned by the Impressionists.