First up : my boyfriend and I spent a lovely weekend in Bendigo, and saw the Archibald exhibition at their gallery (which, in my biased opinion, is not as good as my Ballarat gallery... hehe).
Vincent Fantauzzo
Brandon
Archibald Prize entrant 2009
It was an interesting exhibition : I'm always interested to see what artworks are chosen in terms of technical skill and artistic merit, and ones which may have been chosen with the subject of the portrait in mind. I guess it would be hard to find balance, and an immense task to undertake putting the exhibition together. I don't like to compare year to year this exhibition, as it is so unique, but I just don't know if I was impacted as much by this collection as the previous year's entrants.
The Cherry Hood portrait of David Helfgott (pictured above) was one of my favourites, huge and confronting, but with lovely soft paint dripping and forming a lovely painting. Hood is a favourite artist of mine, her paintings of children are beautiful and haunting. I'm looking forward to seeing David Helfgott play at Her Majesty's Theatre in Ballarat soon.
We also managed to catch the 'A Camera On The Somme' exhibiton (which had lovely WWI photgraphs, highly recommended) and have some of the always-delicious woodfire pizza from GPO, yum! Funny, I never went there when I was living in Bendigo, but everytime we are in Bendigo now it's almost a tradition that we go there.
Topped off by a purchase of night in with scrabble challenges, all round a fantastic day.
