Del Kathryn Barton - The Last Night as My Life as a Cat (2005)

Del Kathryn Barton - Come of Things (2010)

Del Kathryn Barton: You Are What Is Most Beautiful About Me (2008) - Archibald Prize Winner

Del Kathryn Barton - Mother: A Portrait of Kate (2011)

Del Kathryn Barton - The Stars Eat Your Body (2009)

John Honeywill: Paper House 1 (2010)

John Honeywill: High & Dry 2 (2011)

John Honeywill: High & Dry 1 (2011)

John Honeywill: Soap Packet II (2010)

Virtual Deaf Man's House

For the past 2 weeks I've been running the 14 paintings from Goya's Quinta Del Sol (The Deaf man's House) which are better known as The Black Paintings. If you're interested in seeing how they were placed in the actual  farm house where Goya painted these works in self-exile in his last years, there is a virtual tour online (of course) showing placement and relative sizes - well worth a look if you're interested in Goya.

Goya: Judith & Holofernes - Black Paintings 1820-23

Goya: Pilgrimage to San Isidro - Black Paintings 1820-23

Goya: Procession of the Holy Office - Black Paintings 1820-23

Goya: The Dog - Black Paintings 1820-23

You can view Goya's Dog as being submerged, up to its neck, buried in sand, or sinking slowly into quicksand - unable to extricate itself. It raises its head, trying to keep itself "above water". The emptiness of the picture frame above it and the placement of the dog at the base of the painting emphasises its helplessness. 

Alternatively, you can see the dog as hiding behind a ridge, trying to hide and protect itself. It raises its head looking up at the impending danger from above – which might be some kind of landfall, flood or storm. And now the depth of the upper area suggests the overwhelming nature of whatever the threat is.

Either way, it is a picture about survival in the face of hopeless doom. Whether the danger comes from below or from above, the picture tells us there is no escape. Simple, but in so many ways one of the most powerful of Goya's Black Paintings and one which speaks volumes on his views at the time. These last works by Goya show the crossover between traditional and modern as well as the ambiguity of the image and this rightfully places Goya as the first of the Moderns. This work is a brilliant example of that unique positioning in history.
Burn brightly, Pete 

Oh To Be in Boston....

Brisbane to Boston.... the attraction of walking the streets that Robert B Parker, Dennis Lehane and Jeremiah Healy inhabit has always been tempting, but of late there are other reasons for me wishing I was in Boston right now. 


The Boston Museum of Fine Art currently has (by all accounts) a wonderful exhibition of Degas Nudes on for the next few months. Edgar Degas is best known for his paintings of horse races and ballerinas in rehearsal, but from the 1870s until about 10 years before his death in 1917, Degas knocked out some of the greatest nudes in the history of Impressionism and Western art. Only the media changed - charcoal, pastel, paint, monotype, lithograph, clay - but the consistency of image remained constant. Degas stripped away centuries of idealisation and to a degree, sentimentality, revealling the female form as it was in his lifetime. From all accounts, Boston's MFA exhibition has gathered some of the best American Degas nudes and French works together and also mixes other contemporaries alongside to help offer comparisons and break the image flow. The images are at times unsettling as well with some of the images depicting brothel workers and lesbian sex alongside some of the more well-known and admired Degas work's showing women at bathtime and drying themselves in mise-en-scene paintings. Oh... to be in Boston...

Goya: Old Men Eating - Black Paintings 1820-23

Goya: Leocadia - Black Paintings 1820-23

Leocadia (or Leocardia) Weiss lived with Goya the last years of his life. She was hired as a housekeeper, bringing with her daughter Rosario. Goya taught Rosario painting and drawing skills, and she later had a career as a painter in France and Spain. Goya's will instructed that at his death she was to be treated as a "natural child." This has led to speculation that Goya fathered Rosario as he had known Leocadio for several years prior to hiring her. However, many Goya biographers say that the dating does not match up, that it is more likely that Leocadia's husband, whom she had divorced years earlier, was Rosario's father.


This painting of Leocadia is one of the fourteen "Black Paintings" executed by Goya upon the walls of his house in Madrid. X-rays of the image show that originally the figure leaned on a fireplace mantle, and that she was not dressed in mourning clothing, as shown here. The usual speculation is that Goya himself added the funeral aspects later, when mood, or old age, had moved him to give a different message to the image. 

Goya: Men Reading - Black Paintings 1820-23

Goya: Fight with Cudgels - Black Paintings 1820-23

Goya: Goat (Witches' Sabbath) - Black Paintings 1820-23