October 14, 2012
Jeffrey Smart: Approach to the City
Jeffrey Smart is one of Australia’s best known artists for his almost iconic urban imagery. The 20th century urban landscapes are superb geometrical compositions and bold colour.
Jeffrey Smart, Approach to the City, 1968-9
Despite the artist stating that the figures within his painting are primarily included to serve the needs of the composition many viewers continue to interpret his paintings as having something to say about modern industrial society.
It has similarities with the 1962 painting Cahill Expressway that featured an obscured, bald, rotund, Alfred Hitchcock-like man under the Cahill Expressway in Sydney in the right middle ground of the painting.
October 3, 2012
Beach Boys: Summer's Gone
A track from The Beach Boys That's Why God Made the Radio, which is a full studio album made just six months after their official reunion. It sounds like a group of old friends getting back together for a trip down memory lane. Its a glimpse in the rearview mirror.
Most of the album is forgettable until the final three tracks – From There to Back Again, Pacific Coast Highway and Summer's Gone – that form a kind of suite written by Brian Wilson:
There are good melodies, sparse instrumentation, and the vocals take center stage. Wilson has the knack of blending the individual voices of The Beach Boys into a virtual choir that has been and remains unique in American music history.
Summer's Gone evokes California Girls but ’ the melancholy side of summer wins out over the fun, fun, fun.
It sounds and feels like not only the perfect end to the album and at the end of a fifty year career. The ripple of a wave as the record ends, aptly marries beach imagery with resignation, pain and sadness of growing old. It's time to go.