Sydney’s Hidden Jewel – 150 Year Celebration of The Nicholson Museum

In 2010, The Nicholson Museum, Sydney’s and perhaps Australia’s best kept secret, will celebrate its 150th year with a special exhibition Charles Nicholson: Man & Museum

Portraiture – Egypt to Enlightenment

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever…Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
author Carolyn McDowall
What is a portrait? Is it an actual likeness of someone? If we know the person portrayed is a General, King or Queen will it change our viewpoint? What is a portrait’s function?  Is it meant to show the sitter at their most characteristic ?
The [...]

An affair of state…wise men needed now!

Perhaps the getting of wisdom is when we realize, despite eons of learning, that in the grand scheme of things we really know very little at all.  Carolyn McDowall

January 6 is the climax of the twelve days of Christmas known as The Epiphany.
For early ‘followers of the way’ gathering in the catacombs, the underground burial [...]

Women of Influence – Angelica Kauffmann

Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none…Benjamin Franklin 1706 – 1790

author Carolyn McDowall
As far as women are concerned the Age of Reason in the eighteenth century was inappropriately named. This was a period when the role of women, especially in a professional sphere, took a retrograde [...]

Colour Considerations

People can have the Model T in any colour – so long as it’s black…Henry Ford (1863-1947)

Author Carolyn McDowall
All cultures on earth have particular perceptions of and about colour, which in its evolution has come to symbolize many things collectively and individually. It also has many variants so we could say it is neither [...]

Bunny in Sydney – Art or Artifice…

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) The Critic as Artist, 1891
This exhibition many would say is long overdue. In the landscape of Australian painting history Rupert Bunny is a significant figure who inserted himself effortlessly into French Parisian life during the so-called ‘Belle Epoque’ or beautiful era, demonstrating through [...]

Bublé and Bunny…what more could Sydney want

Sydney has it all at the moment….both Bublé and Bunny!
This is a reminder the Rupert Bunny- Artist in Paris Exhibition opens at the Sydney Art Gallery tomorrow,  21st November and runs until 21st February. Rupert Bunny (1864-1947) created wonderful images during the so called Belle Époque, or ‘gilded’ age at Paris from the late 19th [...]

Love Jewellery – Rome to Renaissance

If you bring both gold and precious or semi precious stones together skilfully a add a dash of passion, smidgen of sentiment, make them expressive of romance as well as symbolic of true love then you have a ‘tour de force’, a triumph of Cupid’s D’art!

An important aspect of every human society yet recorded is a belief that gold and gemstones had an enormous effect on the affairs of many. This has not been limited to any age or culture some of the first tokens of human affection were worn as treasured souvenirs.

The Flight of the Egret

There are some in our society who are blessed with great creative gifts. Imagination is surely one, however it is one thing to have the ability to form images and ideas in the mind, especially of things never seen or never experienced directly, but quite another to connect those to the totality of real things in the world in order to convey knowledge or influence our perception of them.

Mirror Mirror on the wall…

he mirror has occupied a unique place in his imagination as a site of the divine or demonic, of lucidity or madness. It is the ‘matrix of the symbolic’ and accompanies the human quest to know and understand our identity.