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Make graceful and lasting change

Sydney Contemporary 2023


Cindy Tonkin - September 9, 2023

Avril gave me a freeby to Sydney Contemporary this week, which was a fabulous exploration.

i only took pix of things i loved or things I wanted to replicate.

Here’s a reasonably detailed outline of what I saw and why i took pix. It’s been a week where I’ve also seen a lot of one-woman shows, standup and improv, so my brain is in high creative mode (but also a little tired). For more details on who did what, just scroll down to the entire set of photos i took on the day, where the gallery and the artist’s info are all with the pieces. Here’s my brain dump.

A few had a strong stencil / pochoir component in the paintings:

And this one with both pochoir and with a base of collaged backgrounds.

I think i just liked this, although now i’m looking at it more it would be a starting point for a lot of monopoly / scrabble boards and tiles I have in my “do something wih this” box

this one reminded me of how much i like doing the Stuart Davis style still life stuff, so i could get back to that.

This one had a great calm about it, and on zoom in it’s like a set of shoelaces / discarded leather glued to the canvas. I have all the resources I need to try this – do i have the patience?

Found objects are also lovely, and this installation is fabulous.

And while we’re talking about words, this one, on linen, is beautifully executed. the lines are so darn crisp I suspect another pochoir (with laser cutters, why wouldn’t they be crisp as?

It’s hard to see in the photo, but this is a giant tiger balm container. maybe 60cm wide. just fun.

More beautiful objects, this time strung on a clothesline almost.

and because i’ve been collecting (and discarding) things that could make cardboard assemblages like this one, nice to see the colours.

and finally some 30x30s which look great together.

The rest of this post is the full set of images I took, including where I remembered the name of the gallery exhibiting them, and of course the artist’s name and materials etc (whatever was on display).

So of course I don’t draw enough but this one which has on the left the artist making the work by tracing her body onto the paper, and the output on the right, reminded me that it’s simple, and i could do that too.

It was great to see so much varied art (and insane to see the prices).

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