September was a good month for us, the highlight being a wonderful holiday in the South of France with beautiful weather. We visited an exhibition in Aix-en Provence about the many artists influenced by the South during their lifetime, including Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, Monet and Dali and this proved fascinating. In Antibes, Cannes, Mougins and Nice we also saw some excellent contemporary art, both in the local markets and galleries.
I’ve now seen the Jonathan Yeo portrait exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Although comparatively small, taking up only two rather poorly lit rooms, the show is superb and well worth a visit. (It’s free too!) There are many celebrities featured, including Helena Bonham Carter, Nicole Kidman, Sienna Miller, Damien Hirst, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Fry, Michael Parkinson, Prince Philip, David Walliams and many more. Yeo is self-taught and one of the most talented artists around today. His style is fairly distinctive, and there are times when I wish my work had a clear identity which viewers could instantly recognise!
Exhibitions on Australian Art at the Royal Academy of Arts and Vienna at the National Gallery will also be hard to resist! La Galleria in Pall Mall, which has a few of my paintings in stock, will shortly be hosting an exhibition by Charles Billich, a talented and highly successful Australian artist who is apparently quite controversial and not generally accepted by the Australian Art establishment! He is, however, something of a celebrity and a showman who paints in public at his exhibition openings in a fairly sensational and unconventional manner! There are a number of videos showing these events.
Painting activity is rather slow at the moment, but our holiday in France has been inspirational, so watch this space! For now I have uploaded a new gallery called “Australia” which was prompted by a visit to the William Ricketts Sanctuary near Melbourne – an open air shrine in woodland consisting of around 150 ceramic sculptures of Aborigines by Bill Ricketts, an eccentric artist who accepted and understood Aboriginal culture and tradition.