It’s that time of year again – you can’t choose the right jacket to go out in because the weather is always undecided and the Crested Pigeons are doing a dance on the roof next door. Yes, it’s spring time

Sebastian Smee, our favourite expat arts writer – and let’s all hope he stays that way – likes to decorate his writing with what he knows. His recent piece for The Australian’s Review section displayed Smee’s mad passion for the

There’s a real sense of backlog here at The Art Life and we’re doing the best we can to shift it. Perhaps a little bran in the morning will help? People are writing in and asking questions like “hey, what

Imagine a painting by John Young. There’s an image taken from a source of classical Indian, Chinese or Tibetan art or some such, and then there’s some images placed over the top, a boat, or a flower, some clouds or

Across town there’s another show of paintings that could loosely be described as “conceptual” – if such a term means much anymore – but where an artist like John Young eschews any expressionist inferences in his work, Noel McKenna embraces

Last week we were asked if it were true that the Art Gallery of NSW was closing down the Level 2 Contemporary Projects space after the end of the current James Angus truck installation. We promised we would ask someone

New NGA Chief Hailed by Dubbo Liberal The appointment of the head of the Art Gallery of South Australia Ron Radford to the directorship of the National Gallery of Australia last week has been hailed by Helen Musa of the

This week we welcome a whole lot of new readers visiting via our greatly expanded mailing list. If you want to get on the mailing list, send an email to theartlife@hotmail.com. If you want to get off the list –

We proclaim it from the mountaintop: painting is dead! Yet painting is still alive, or just a little bit alive on life support, or undead. There are people in galleries all over town bitterly complaining that painting is ignored and