Sulman Prize finalists 2021

This year I decided to split my coverage of the annual spectacular prize hangs into separate posts, beginning with the Sulman. The Archibald and Wynne will be covered on subsequent days.

The Sulman hang was the first one to view when you entered this year. I didn’t get all of the images I wanted because of haste. This was partly due to the fact that the crowds were quite thick for the show. The queue to get tickets snaked around the ground floor, for a start, stretching all the way back – when I exited on the Friday I saw the show – past the entrance to the bookshop. I only waited about 10 minutes to get my ticket but waiting also happened once I got downstairs to the rooms the paintings were in. This was due to Covid restrictions on numbers. Inside, I stepped on people’s heels a couple of times as I manoeuvred myself into position trying to capture the image I needed for this post.

The first item I snapped was Sally Anderson’s ‘Nat’s Seatown cliff fall with Nik’s structure and McEvoy banksia’, a pretty amalgam that places unlike elements one beside the other to create a harmonious composition dominated by muted colours. The subdued red of the banksia is offset pleasantly by the blue used in the bottom right-hand side of the canvas. The work is acrylic, which gives it a sketchy, improvised feel that blends in with the nature of the contingent placement of disparate elements.

Nik’s structure is, presumably, the black element in the top left of the canvas, and it’s something that talks with the Seatown cliff fall drawing (bottom left). The way that Australian society developed from the edges of the continental landmass seems to emerge as an idea in this painting. I was reminded of the banksias you can see on the walk around Cronulla and the headlands to the south of that fabled beach. Cronulla also a site of suburban refuge – where people have traditionally gone to get away from their workday concerns, to have a meal and bathe in the sea.

Next in my list is John Bokor’s ‘Rose and lemons’ a still life with everyday objects that give the painting a demotic feel. This piece would make a good addition to any suburban living room – and you can buy the artist’s canvases from Edwina Collette in Brisbane. There’s something of Blackman in this work, the colours especially (love that olive green used for the background and the plate) but also the wonky perspective that gives the painting a preliminary feel. While the composition is paramount each item it embraces is visually striking and recognisable – the glass to the right-hand side being as resilient in the operation of the spectator’s eye as the book placed confrontingly at the front of the canvas.

Paul Higgs’ ‘Hurstville platform wall’ is a nice, complex and visually stimulating design that has elements of collage (I wonder how they’d last over time). Normally I’m not a big fan of seeing things stuck to a canvas – perhaps I’m a purist at heart (I don’t like many of Whiteley’s works on this account) – but here the effect is lively. Rosalie Gascoigne is possibly an influence.

Jude Rae’s ‘On the beach (Malua Bay, NYE 2019)’ is interesting because of its combination of formalism and temporal and geographical specificity. The artist has placed the viewer at a particular place at a particular point in time but the style has a dream-like and timeless feel. The use of orange throughout the design makes the painting look like a TV ad, the colours bleached out for effect in order to transport the viewer to a place and time outside the parameters of the everyday. But the activity depicted is festive. There are lots of people around, for a start. It’s not as if you’re in a nightmare – though that horse is a bit disturbing, being so much larger than the people gathered around it.

You can buy Georgia Spain’s work at The Egg and Dart and in fact she had an exhibition there this year. Her ‘Getting down or falling up’ won the Sulman Prize this year. The work toys with the figurative and the abstract, asking you to decide which is dominant. You can see figures in the canvas but they bleed and sway like trees in a heavy breeze.

I tried to take a photo of Maria Purcell’s ‘That time of day’ but it didn’t turn out as desired, so the next work I’ll focus on (this time successfully!) is Paul Selwood’s ‘Construction zone’, which I chose because I’m a big fan of brutalism.

Suzanne Archer’s 'Winterburn’ is a lovely, intricate painting that looks back to the eighties. I really enjoyed seeing this work, which contains diagrammatic representations of things in the world that are subsumed in a fantasy-scape where anything might be possible. I also like the lack of specificity, which allows the viewer to have a range of different thoughts while looking at the canvas. The red and the purple seems to move and shimmer on it, and the little white figure at right floats carelessly amid this pleasant world’s glowing colours.

Another abstract work, but one which looks back to the seventies, is John Fitzgibbon’s ‘Time, mystery, and memory’, its earth tones reminding me of the postwar era with its ambitions and dreams. Many of the ideas that artists of this era played with – a certain monumentalism, a muted triumphalism – were further questioned in the following decade. The seventies was the last time that Modernism was able to dominate unquestioned, and by the eighties Postmodernism had started to make artworks more self reflexive and overtly aware of the process of creation. Fitzgibbon’s work sitting next to Archer’s was a nice touch on the part of the trustees.

A delicate and typical naïve artwork is Sally M Nangala Mulda’s ‘Town camp everyday’, which uses the vernacular of Aboriginal communities in the outback to depict life far from the inner city enclaves where the art gallery is situated.

Chris O’Doherty (aka Reg Mombassa) got a painting hung, the one below, which is titled ‘Gum trunk with koala’. Typical for this artist it is humorous, though with a sharp edge -see those sticks of dynamite strapped to the creature’s chest?

Glenn Morgan’s ‘The best loser’ tells a story of a boxing match. Also naïve, this one has a strong narrative arc taking the viewer into a room full of spectators with, at the centre, two pugilists intent on smashing the other’s face in. I enjoyed this work and thought to myself how amazing it is to see such a broad range of styles in one show. 

Take two: The Master of Petersberg, JM Coetzee

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

This copy of the master’s 1995 novel was, the sticker tells me, bought in 2004 at Kinokuniya. The sticker adorns the back of the book like a message from the distant past though I am not aware if I bought it new or if it was bought instead at a sale or at an op shop. Most likely it was bought at the bookstore by me one day when I was in the city – I lived in Sydney in 2004 and was just getting back into the habit of reading novels.

Take two: The Golden Age, Joan London

For full review, see my Patreon. 

I learned of this 2014 novel when, on 4 December 2019, I read an interview with Anthony Macris on the WritersNSW website. I subsequently, on 4 June this year, bought the book on Kindle. In the photo above I’m standing in my bedroom – which is also my study. A photograph of my grandmother as a child is partly visible at the right-hand side, in the top corner. She would have been older than Frank’s parents, if they’d been real. At the centre, behind my head, is a painting by Neridah Stockley, ‘Tom Price dusty sunset’.

Garden Lounge Creative Space, King Street, Newtown

I got to this event last night in the car by parking in the 4-hour metred zone up in Darlington and by catching the bus down King Street. On-board two kind people with American accents (who were locals) got through to me that the 370 was the bus I needed – which was good because that was the one that stopped. The driver somehow not being able to understand what I needed to know.

As usual I was early and Michael – who runs the Garden Lounge – made me a flat white to compensate for the effort of travelling all that distance from my home. People filed in in dribs and drabs but proceedings didn’t really get started until about 6.30pm. I’d arrived an hour earlier and a lovely man named David took pity on me and we discussed poetry and dreams.

Like me, David writes down his dreams. He agreed with me that “capture” is the right word to use for this process – due to the fleeting impermanence of a phenomenon that, once you’re awake, disappears (as he put it) “in a puff of smoke”. He said he dreams often of whales and the ocean. I told him about my dreams of a workplace I was at 30 years prior.

The readings themselves were footnoted heavily by Michael, who made a point of underscoring the importance of the acknowledgement of country. His version was rather long and intricate but this theme was reprised by the poets, Peter describing in one poem ceremonial statues made by Tiwi Islanders (you can see them at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on the ground floor), Michelle Cahill adding her own acknowledgement of First Nations people and underscoring – in turn – their precious custodianship of the land. In one of her poems, Michelle described roadkill in a way that made you recognise how important it was. For her part, Judith Beveridge talked in a preamble about fruit bats that, near Taree, had been falling out of trees due, she thought, to climate change.

Above: Mark Mordue reading

What struck me most about these four poets was the dividing line between the generations, Michelle and Mark being in most respects more interesting to me. Michelle, especially (and I singled her out in a post I made last month at a similar event) creates fine imagery with poetic language.

Above: Michelle Cahill reading

Peter and Michelle shared common ground in talking about colonial ambition. Mark signalled to a similar theme in one of his preambles when he described stones he’d once found on the South Coast – near Thirroul, a lovely little town near Wollongong – that he thought were the remnants of waste middens left by Aboriginal people. Mark was very conscious in his selection of poems about the fleeting nature of existence, and in one of them described a time when a man he knew pulled a gun on him. Judith countered by talking us though the approach of a mantis to a caterpillar, the coiling of the resources and the strike. Peter affectingly used words that described his late partner.

Above: Peter Boyle reading

I wasn’t able to stay for the second session of readings due to the time limit on my parking space so as soon as Judith had finished her first set I used the facilities out the back of the café them bustled out to the street and promptly missed the bus. I went south instead of north and the number 307 was five minutes early. Traffic on King Street was pretty horrible, however, so it was just as quick to hoof it and I negotiated my way through the crowds of diners, the evening strollers, and the groups of young people spilling onto the pavement outside pubs all along the busy thoroughfare.

Above: Judith Beveridge reading

Take two: A Portable Paradise, Roger Robinson

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

I learned about this prize-winning collection of political poetry from Jeremy Noel-Tod, a poetry teacher who commented on Twitter with a photo of one of Robinson’s poems and a photo of the book cover, which is shown in the above photo in the Kindle version. It’s hard to see what’s on the cover, which is in dark tones, but it’s a photograph showing young men on a street. I heard about the book on 14 January last year and got around to buying it from Amazon on 3 June this year.

Take two: The Autograph Man, Zadie Smith

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

For a decade this’d been sitting unread in my collection, its 2002 publication going unnoticed by me: just back home from a disastrous nine-year foray to Tokyo I’d suffered from delusions and ended up in a mental institution. Japan treated me unkindly and in Smith’s novel the protagonist – who’s half Chinese and Jewish – also struggles with the world (there’d be nothing to write about if he didn’t), the writer spending time painting contemporary reality full of accidental effort and bent dreams, working slowly so that by the time the story really opens you’re at page 100, at an auction with Alex Li-Tandem seated next to two familiars, men who, like him, buy and sell autographs. The subject matter integral to Smith’s comic and cosmic purpose; she wrings the planet through her creative mangle, its wrinkles and flaws alternately flattened out with ridicule and praise.

Grocery shopping list for May 2021

 This post is the twenty-ninth in a series and the eighth to chronicle diets. From this month I was again living alone.

1 May 

Morning weigh-in had me at 89.3kg. Later, went to Thirroul Fruit Barn and bought (see receipt below) apples, pears, avocados, and sundried tomatoes.

2 May

Morning weigh-in had me at 89.9kg. Later, went to the Fish Market and bought snapper fillets, salmon, and swordfish steaks. Also bought comte cheese and blue cheese. See receipts below.

My calorie count for the week was:

My activity was:

My macronutrient totals were:

This week I ate an average of 51.6g of carbs a day.

4 May

Morning weigh-in had me at 89.6kg. Later, went to buy petrol on Cleveland Street and also picked up milk and – to keep in the car – bottled water.

6 May 

Morning weigh-in had me at 89kg. Later, went to Coles and bought (see receipt below) filet steak, lamb chops, pastrami, bacon, sliced ham, turkey breast, mushrooms, plums, nashi, rocket, an avocado, taramosalata, and low-carb snacks.

8 May

Morning weigh-in had me at 89.2kg. Later, was in a Chinese supermarket in Wolli Creek so while there I bought something I’d needed: eggs.

10 May 

Morning weigh-in had me at 89.3kg. My weekly calorie count was:

My activity chart was:

My macronutrient chart was:

This week I ate an average of 62.1g of carbs daily.

Later, I went to Broadway Coles and bought (see receipt below) milk, apples, low-carb bread, red Leicester cheese, walnuts, and mayonnaise.

14 May

Morning weigh-in had me at 88.3kg. Later, went to Woolies in Pyrmont and bought (see receipt below) a Nile perch fillet, d’Affinois cheese, marinaded goat’s cheese, tarmosalata, bacon, low-car snacks, kiwifruit, pears, an avocado, and strawberries.

16 May 

Morning weigh-in had me at 88.8kg. Later, went to IGA and bought (see receipt below) milk, Jarlsberg cheese, apples, kiwifruit, a capsicum, a lettuce, and Roma tomatoes.

This week’s calorie count was, as follows:

The activity chart was:

And the macronutrient chart was:

The week past I ate an average of 59.1g of carbs – again a bit high, but still I lost weight.

21 May

Morning weigh-in had me at 88.3kg. Later, went to IGA and bought (see receipt below) milk, Bega Tasty cheese, Jarlsberg cheese, sliced chicken, sliced ham, plums, apples, a lettuce, almonds, and low-carb snacks.

22 May 

Morning weigh-in had me at 88.4kg. Later, caught the bus to Redfern and walked to Newtown to Campos’ store and bought coffee. Then at the bulk foods store on King Street picked up Brazil nuts and macadamia nuts.

23 May

Morning weigh-in had me at 88.5kg. Later, caught the bus to the Fish Market and bought (see receipt below) Tunnel and Mons comte cheese, Jersey gouda, salmon fillets, ling fillets, orange roughy fillets, and swordfish steaks.

The week’s calorie count was, as follows:

The activity chart was:

The macronutrient chart was:

This week I ate an average of 52g of carbs per day.

24 May

Went to the IGA in the morning and bought (see receipt below) eggs, a capsicum, tomatoes, black olives, cooked asparagus, artichoke hearts, almonds and mushrooms

25 May

Morning weigh-in had me at 88.1kg. Later, went to Chemist Warehouse and bought mouthwash. Popped in also at IGA and bought soap and taramosalata. Receipts below.

26 May

Went to Coles in Broadway SC and bought low-carb bread. Also got medicated shampoo from pharmacy in Pyrmont I used to go to (and still use).

27 May

Morning weigh-in had me at 88kg. At 7.04am, I received an SMS from Australia Post about a delivery from a place called “The Hamper” and immediately replied to the effect that it wasn’t my package. The message didn’t go through so I thought for a while then understood in a flash – which was sudden yet natural, as though I’d know it all along – that the estate agents had organised a gift. I SMS’d Mark Petersen of Sotheby’s and asked him and he confirmed that, yes, it had been their idea. 

The original SMS said the parcel would come on this day and at 7.45am the doorbell rang and I opened the gate for the postie (see van in photo below).

The box contained garlic salt flakes, olive oil, red wine, almonds, quince paste, crackers, capsicum tapenade, and sundried tomatoes. All of them looked very expensive but most of them I wouldn’t be able to eat due to my diet. I should’ve recommended, when he’d on an earlier occasion mentioned the idea of a gift, that Mark should buy a box of cheese instead of expensive crackers and confectionery!

It was nice a gift but I gave most of the hamper to friends, this series of events underlining for me how poorly we understand food if the obvious candidate was ignored in favour of others less suitable for a person with my physical needs. I reflected upon this with a kind of wry calm – how many people eat the wrong foods and pass over others that are just as nutritious and tasty but that contain far less of the things they should avoid? – but anyway thanked Mark for his thoughtful gesture. 

In the evening, when I dropped the treats off at my friend’s house in Wolli Creek, I happened to be in Woolies and while there took the opportunity to buy laundry liquid and Brazil nuts. The latter item had been very hard to find; the former was bulky and my car was parked nearby.

30 May 

Morning weigh-in had me at 87.6kg. Later, went to IGA and bought (see receipt below) low-carb snacks, pears, a tomato, apples, milk, and gouda cheese.

My weekly calorie count looked like this:

My activity chart:

My macronutrient chart:

This week I ate an average of 54.7g of carbs per day.

31 May

Morning weigh-in had me at 87.2kg. Later, went to Harris Farm Markets in Kings Cross and bought (see receipt below) tomatoes, apples, strawberries, mushrooms, an avocado, brie, provolone, marinaded goat’s cheese, and chicken wings.