How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!– Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
I can’t believe that it’s now three months or so since I last posted here! Never mind, we have been rather busy, what with buying a new house and moving in.
I will try to post more regularly here in future.
He will watch from dawn to gloom
…Nor heed, nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man…– Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Prometheus Unbound”
‘Mask II’ by Ron Mueck
Today we went to an exhibition of the work of Australian-born hyper-realist sculptor Ron Mueck at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.
I’ve been a huge fan of Mueck’s work since my wife and I stumbled across his work “Ghost” in the Tate in 2000. This striking sculpture is so real that it could be taken for a real human being, frozen in time, if it were not that it was one and a half times normal size. It’s an image of an adolescent girl in a bathing costume, shrinking away from scrutiny – “Leave me alone!” you can almost hear her cry. Yet the audience cannot tear their eyes from her.
If Mueck were merely an incredibly talented model-maker, these works would be fascinating, but that’s all. Yet the realism of his sculpture, combined with huge variations of scale which he often employs, is often shocking; and each of his works is emotionally engaging, sometimes deeply so. There’s no doubt that these are true works of art.
Anyway, we visited the exhibition today and saw more of Mueck’s works “in the flesh” than I have ever managed before.
Here are some inadequate photos to illustrate what we saw. (Taken with my iPhone and enhanced with PhotoAcute software).
'In Bed' by Ron Mueck
'Woman with sticks' by Ron Mueck
'Wild Man' by Ron Mueck
I know I haven’t updated this blog for three months, no doubt disappointing my tens of thousands of regular readers*.
The main reason for this long gap is that I was pushed a bit off balance by the death of my 91-year old father, Bill Grigg, in October.
Though it had been clear for some months that his health was declining rapidly, and he had gone voluntarily into a nursing home in June, it was still a blow when the end eventually came. It was particularly hard, of course, on my mother. They had been married for 60 years.
I don’t want to publish very much about my father here – I’m not much in favor of publishing very personal material to the wide world of the Internet (so call me a dinosaur in this era of twittering every random thought).
I did put together a photo tribute to my father on DVD, which was played at the funeral service, and I also spoke about how, by his example, he contributed greatly to my love of reading, and particularly reading science fiction and fantasy (he was a great fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs).
Speaking of which, I’ll try to catch up in a separate blog, however, briefly, on the reading I’ve done over the last few months.
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* Well, disappointing my daughter and my mother, anyway, and possibly two or three others. My wife, I think, doesn’t see much point in reading my blog since she hears most of this stuff from me directly.
We’ve just returned from a short but very pleasant stay in Daylesford, Victoria.
Daylesford is currently being promoted heavily on television at the moment through a commercial which links images of young people having a very good time and a soundtrack of the song “Down in the river to pray” which was featured in the movie “Brother, Where Art Thou?”. It’s a beautiful song, but I have no idea how this religious lyric (inviting everyone to go down and pray in the river) relates to the luxurious and sybaritic lifestyle depicted in the visuals…
Despite this saturation advertising, we weren’t particularly influenced by it to chose Daylesford for a weekend away – it’s close to Woodend, and Castlemaine, where we’ve been many times, and it had been on our list to visit for some time.
Anyway, I took the above photograph while we were ambling around the lake in Daylesford, a comfortable 2 km walk. On the day we had arrived, it was raining heavily (much to be desired in our current drought conditions, but not so good for tourism), but on the next day it was absolutely perfect, not a cloud in the sky, and a mild temperature ideal for walking about.
That night after dinner, we went back down to the edge of the lake and stared up at the night sky. The spread of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds were very easy to see, and an absolute wealth of stars which are just lost to us in the city. It makes you yearn for the chance to escape the city and see such glory far more often.
