Sunday

Hubby and I decided that we would have a day out on Sunday to visit a photographic exhibition and a vineyard with a display of sculptures.  Both places we were visiting were on the Mornington Peninsula which is one of my favourite places to visit and relatively close to home.

Our first stop was the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery to see '49 Sheds', an exhibition of 49 photos of sheds from across rural Australia by Monash University lecturer and architect Ross Brewin.

 

  You can see an example of his work by going to this link.  Click on 49 sheds and scroll down to the bottom of the page.  We were interested to learn that in June/July this year, the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery will be hosting the touring Archibald Prize for 2013 and 2014.  The Art Gallery of NSW chose them to be the sole Victorian host so we might head back down again then.   Information about the Archibald Prize can be found here.

Adjacent to the gallery is the Mornington Peninsula Botanical Rose garden planted with 5000 roses in a 1.6 hectare area of the Civic Reserve.  We had a wander around and enjoyed a sea of colour.

 
 It was quite difficult to get good photos as the garden is plonked right in the middle of a very busy urban area with ugly shops in the background and very little beauty elsewhere to use as a nice backdrop.  I did get this photo of a sculpture set in the garden which I thought was quite nice although it belies the fact that a very busy road runs right in front of those houses.

 Making our visit that much more enjoyable was we were able to visit another gallery adjacent to the rose garden.  The Oak Hill Gallery is a community arts co-operative, displaying works from local artists.  The gardens surrounding this little gallery set in an old house were very interesting, more dry climate foliage was growing and seemed to suit the area more than the roses.  I quite liked this display below, the play of the grey foliage against the colourful recycled bricks was aesthetically very pleasing to me.

I liked this sculpture too.  Very simple but somehow more sympathetic to the environment than the one in the rose garden.  The Oak Hill Gallery was in the house you can see in the background.

Inside the gallery itself was a nice variety of artwork from oils, acrylics, sketches etc.  The best display of work in my opinion was a series of nudes by local artist John Trebilco.  I had his permission to take the following photos of his work.  The interesting thing about these painting is they had been stored away for about 30 years, the work having been done when John was at Monash University.  The technique used for this artwork was to cover the canvas in linseed oil and then do a quick 5 minute painting by adding colour.  If I could do a painting like any of these in 5 minutes I would be very happy.

 

During storage a sheet of paper was placed between each painting and when they were rediscovered in the artists shed, he had the mirror image of the painting on the paper and then chose to hang the paintings with their mirror images.   I love the colours in these paintings.  The following two paintings were my favourites.

This portrait is rather lovely too and the photos gives you an idea of the mirror imaging.

I had intended to include photos of the sculpture at the vineyard but as this has turned into a longer post than I thought, I'll save those for another post.

Anne  xx