Jeffrey Smart (1921-) - Australian Modernist Painter

I've always loved and admired the modernist urban landscapes of Jeffrey Smart - partly cos they remind me of two other favorite painters - David Hockney and the Australian, Alan Oldfield (see earlier posts on both artists).


There is a quality of airlessness and bleaching light in all three, and a clear and spacious setting out of the elements in a picture. A real elegance of formal and geometric design.

Many of these things show one of Smart's strongest influences - the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca (1445-1492) ...

Piero della Francesca Piero 'The Flagellation Of Christ'

What I particularly like in Jeffrey Smart is the way he selects the most ordinary objects and street-scapes and turns them into something classic, sculptural and monumental.

'Morning, Yarragon siding' (1982-84)

'Bus Stop'

On a social level, I love that Jeffrey Smart has lived his life as an openly gay man.

In an interview I was watching today, he talks in such a natural way about, Hermes (?), his partner of thirty something years - not self-consciously pushing a currently politically-correct agenda.

He is also out-spoken in a more general way - and his candor is a breath of fresh air in the sometimes 'rarified' and chocking discourse of serious main-stream painting.

Second study for 'Monument and car park' (1972)

'Bus terminus' (1973)

The two men have lived most of the last forty in Italy, where Smart bought a house in Posticcia Nuova, near Arezzo in 1965.

Study for 'Holiday'

'On the beach, San Diego' (1983)

On a more personal level, I went to an auction at Lawsons here in Sydney a few years back to bid on a study for 'Cooper Park' ...

'Cooper Park'

... and sadly (in retrospect) stopped raising my hand as the work edged up to $14,000. Bugger! LOL.

I really really love this work.

There is something haunting or foreboding about the scene. Perhaps achieved through the dark sky.

And this, to a degree, is in counter point the guy lying casually back on the grassy hill, legs apart and shoes off. Staring unselfconsciously at the viewer - and maybe in askance. I imagine he's gay. Or want him to be.

Oh well, it's on The Regret List - quite high up in fact!

On a happier note, Jeffrey Smart's autobiography 'Not Quite Straight' was published in 1996. I must go out and get it!

As Cute as a Button - The New VW IPO

The new VW, designed in Hamburg, Germany and to be available in Shanghai in 2010, will be a mere $AU900 or $US600!

This tear-shaped single-seater with a 1.7 gallon/6.8 litre tank gets 258 miles per gallon or round 100 kilometres per litre - and has a top speed of 75 miles (120 kilometres) an hour.





I seriously want one and, if I ever did, only hope I wouldn't drive up someone's trouser leg!

'Looking for Anna Pavlova'

It's bound to come out sooner or later ... so I may as well fess up now and just post 'Looking for Anna Pavlova' ...

'Mia culpa' - Okay now!

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) - 'The Lady of the Lamp'

It's a recognized medical condition guys - and I'm taking pills for it.

But unfortunately I could stop myself guys doing it today.

So here's 'Florence Nightingale', the Nick Productions latest release. With the only recording of her voice as the soundtrack.

What do you think?

Some Public Signs - A Bit (or a Lot) of Levity

Absolutely no commentary needed.

But comments welcome!

The Curious Speaking Voice of Virginia Woolf

Googling away, as you do, I heard the speaking voice of Virginia Woolf today - and couldn't have been more surprised. In a 1937 BBC broadcast where she talks about the English language and the process of writing.

I've read widely about the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals that formed round 1908 at the home of Virginia Woolf and her brothers Thorby and Adrian at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury ...


... people such as the writers E M Forster and Lytton Strachey, the philosophers Bertrand Russell and G E Moore, Leonard Woolf, the economic theorist Maynard Keynes, the painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell ... it goes on a bit!

And I guess had a pretty firm idea of what Virginia Woolf's voice would have been like - from having read her novels, and biographies about her such as that of her nephew Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Quentin Bell. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Virginia Woolf's Writing Desk at Monk's House, Rodmell in Sussex

But in the broadcast, Virginia comes across as a bit cool and pompous. And rather more conventionally upper middle class than I'd imagined - as though looking down on her audience from a great height. She did in fact give public lectures to working class men and women about literature - so at least on one level, she was concerned with social reform and enfranchising education.

Virginia Woolf at Garsington 1923, Home of Lady Ottoline Morrell and Haunt of Bloomsbury People

The writer seems ploddingly serious much of the time - with somewhat clumsy and forced attempts at light-hearted humour. The voice is slow, deliberate and plumy - quite different from that I had in mind from accounts of her at times razor sharp wit and lively racy conversation.

But then I guess the context and her perceived audience drove most of what I love/d momentarily out of Ms Woolf!

Virginia Woolf Later in Life

Anyway, I rattled up this video today to go with an audio of one of the raciest bits I could find (well, ... !), adding some more images of her life and circle on top.

But I think I'll stick to the version of Virginia I have in my mind!

A Human Voice Recording of 1860 Discovered - Edouard Léon Scott de Martinville (1817-79) and the Phonautograph

Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

In 2006, a phonautogram was discovered! I'm totally dumb-struck!

It was made by the print-maker Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville - a Frenchman who'd been interested in recording the human voice in a graphic form.

Any person to be recorded would speak into the trumpet of the Scott de Martinville's phonautograph ...

Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville 's phonautograph at the Smithsonian Institute

... such that the sounds of his/her voice would make a membrane at its other end vibrate, with this movement being translated visual form by a stiff brush bristle moving over paper blackened with candle smoke.


The discovery of the particular phonautogram lead to possibility with today's technology of converting the visual record back into audio form, with the following result from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkley California ...

In case you missed it, the song being sung (yes, it was a song!) was 'Au clair de la lune' by Claude Debussy and the words here were ...

Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit ('By the light of the moon, Pierrot replied')

Not sure I don't prefer the version by 60's French pop diva France Gall (http://www.francegall.net) - a mix of Brigitte Bardot, Sandra Dee and Twiggy.

Do you have a preference!

The Crusader Fortress of Krak des Chevaliers (حصن الأکراد) - My Very Next Travel Destination!

I found my next must-go travel destination not long ago in the C12 crusader fortress of Krak des Chevaliers in Syria.


I've traveled through Egypt, Turkey and Israel and have for some time been looking for another Middle Eastern fix. Which has provoked much contra advice, each time making me think of the Spanish saying 'A life lived in fear is a life half lived'.

T E Lawrence described the complex as 'the finest castle in the world' and and the travel writer Paul Theroux as the dream castle of childhood fantasy. And I had exactly something of the sort in mind as a fourteen year old reading 'Knight Crusader' by Ronald Welsh ... in which a young crusader is captured by Saladin's troops and then kept as a servant by an elderly and wealthy merchant. Till, after some years of devoted service, he is given his freedom to return to England.


I particularly remember such exoticisms in the narrative as the descriptions of the sound made by huge black pearls cascaded across a marble table top, and of the delicious thirst-slaking quality of ice-cold sherbet on a blazing hot summer day.

I do all the appropriate and expected research before visiting places like Krak des Chevaliers but I really like the time just before this, when I can just muse and dream on the pleasures in store - a kind of almost erotic reverie. This anticipatory phase can be heightened by photographs and videos, like the great footage shot by Sagonne@YouTube on a visit the fortress ...

... and then enhanced by evocative Arabic music on pipe and drum.

Ok, my appetite is now whetted almost beyond endurance - actually, beyond!

Anyone been to Syria or the castle? I'm now obviously entering the research bit!

Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922) - The Last Castrato Performances

Perhaps the last castrato to perform was the Italian Alessandro Moreschi - evidenced in a series of 17 recordings made in 1902 and in 1904 in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City.

He was First Soprano of the Sistine Choir from 1873 till 1913, being particularly famed for his soprano tessitura in the bel canto repertory.

The practice of castration was banned in 1870, Moreschi being altered round 1865 and before puberty to retain the beauty of his adolescent boy's voice.

Alessandro Moreschi - Tosti 'Ideale' Recorded in the Sistine Chapel by Fred and Will Gainsberg on 7 April 1902 (Ack. Gmmix@YouTube)

Love the cheers of appreciation and support from the Sistine Choir at the end - apparently the singer was visibly shaking during the recording session!

Great Animal Close-Ups - Some Predators and a Couple of (Yummy) Prey

It's the extreme close-up and detail that, for me, makes these photographs extraordinary - and worth posting!






Do you agree?