Travel

Before you say “Wow, the summer heatwaves in USA have finally got to him”, I’m not talking about that city that’s famous for its mobsters in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and more, but Judy Chicago, the feminist artist. My last stay here in the US has been in the depths of Brooklyn. I caught the […]

Incredibly, although I was in Massachusetts for four months last year, I didn’t make it across to Boston, a whole two hours’ drive away from where I was studying at Amherst. Now I know why – self-preservation. Boston is where it all began for modern (i.e. European-colonised) America. Forget all that nonsense about Columbus, because […]

I guess you’ve heard of NYC’s Guggenheim, and marveled at its modern, spiraling form. But the Hirshhorn? The what, you say? Is it some kind of alpine sheep? The Hirshhorn is a part of the Smithsonian stable of museums, in downtown Washington DC. It’s housed in a hollow cylindrical 1960s building (completed 1974) designed by Gordon […]

The first impression was: Canberra on steroids. The second impression was: Canberra on steroids. This is Washington, DC, capital of the Western World, if not the Entire Universe. It’s all wide boulevards and government buildings. Once I saw a shop, but I think it may have been an hallucination brought on by heat exhaustion: the […]

I love Union City’s Bergenline Avenue – it’s like Brisbane’s West End or Sydney’s Newtown before the arty-farty yuppies (i.e. people like me) moved in. ‘The Bergenline’ ain’t no Fifth Avenue. No siree, it has clothes and shoes that are affordable and noticeable. (Other people might say ‘cheap and colourful’, but I’m not other people.) […]

It’s not until you leave Manhattan that you realize how darn busy, noisy, grimy and pressured it is. It’s summertime, which means those locals who can afford a 30-room getaway cottage in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard have left, but for every one of them, it seems ten tourists have sprung up Hydra-like in their […]

Oooh, don’t you just love a nice wedding? Here in Manhattan in the summertime you can’t go a weekend day without seeing white somewhere. Well, white people in white, anyway. I’m yet to see a black American wedding in Manhattan, but I guess it must happen. These weddings seem so much more public than those […]

Well, it’s come and gone, but I’m still here, and I’ve learned a few things along the way. The show of work by students in various summer residencies at the School of Visual Arts (sculpture, painting, bio-art, printmaking, illustration) happened last Thursday night. It was our Big Event after a month of listening, talking, thinking, […]

What a fantastic day! The sun shone, the birds tweeted (somewhere), much of America’s GBLTQ&Whatever population was out on the NYC streets in the prettiest of rainbow gear (it was Gay Pride Day, and they were on the march) without actually blocking entry to Grand Central Station – and a few of us from SVA […]

Last Friday’s guest lecturer was a welcome change: she treated us all as adult artists; she runs a gallery for emerging and mid-career artists and knows how such galleries (and more established ones) operate; and she spent the whole lecture passing on useful stuff in a straightforward, low-ego way. I think she did it so […]