Shane Wombat's Droppings: ... to Arts in Ballan

G'day, Shane 'ere again.
I had a wander through the Ballan Autumn Festival yesterday ... y'know Arts, Crafts, Stalls, Pet Judging, Tableau Vivants eerrr ...Parades.... all the sort of things you see in the Louvre but on a smaller, more modest scale. That's me below sitting and having a gander at the Lal Lal Photographic Groups' exhibition.

They were very polite as they were still setting up but let me have a wander through anyway.
Mostly landscape work with some macro images; mostly good prints, an interesting show.....
Lal Lal is about 20 km SW of Ballan which is 80 Km W of Melbourne... (I thought I'd add that for the American readers so they wouldn't confuse it with the (2) Balan or Ballans in France).
Still mostly rural but fast developing into outer suburbia, Ballan was originally settled around 1840 on Wurunjeri land and by the time gold was discovered in the area it was quite a noted place for its vegetable output and the cordials made with the Mineral Springs water which were shipped to Melbourne and the goldfields at Ballarat. 1870 and its population was around 7000. The First World War hit this area as hard as it did most other country towns in Australia and the losses in young men saw the popultion plummet to around 4200 by 1919 only to fall still further to 2600 by 1951. Presently about 5000. As I said, Lal Lal Photo group were still setting up, as you can see... and as is normal with all groups, one person seems to be doing the work......

www.lallalphotogroup.yolasite.com

....which only goes to prove that photography does lie!

From here we wandered off to the local life drawing group to find Brian Munn, left, local artist (painter) holding the fort for the occasional visitor ... so I numbed him sensless with troglodyte travel tales for a bit ( he survived ..I saw him later, walking and talking at the same time).

Some nice work here too, Brian's, Paul Anthony's and Julia Crawford's particularly.

Then on the way to the Art show I saw this car, a '54 Holden, bright yellow, so we took some shots of it, its owner, Keith Wright, his children, and a bit later he got some more of his toys out, so we shot them too.

Thanks for being so amenable, Keith.

The Kids

Keith and the Yellow Peril

The Toys

The art show had some really nice stuff in it but the hanging was, as so often you see in country shows, a bit daggy! (And for the American reader the word "daggy' was used with intent.)

I know there are volunteer, time, space, size, variety of works.. all those constraints but I dunno, they looked to be, in the main, put up as they came through the door. Which makes works hard to see and for some they tend to disappear because of their surroundings. Ahh well, some of the Salons in Paris weren't any better....

Overview

Overview with the Queen as Foo

Majorie Trebilcock "Oh Yea"

Encaustic

Joel Magpayo, "Bearded Man", Encaustic.

I liked these works for their painterly qualities, both were small about 300mm x 200mm and very expressive.

Thea Koning's, "Alarm Clock" Still Life, Pastel: interesting in that it has been "drawn" from a photograph and the reflections of the photographer are seen in the chrome objects as is the op-shop label. A cute idea but pretty nicely handled except for that rather dense blank shadow....

Sheila Muratori's, "Point Richard", reduced Lino Print and Janet Cattlin's, "Feathered Friends", Collagraph were both little delights in the printmaking section, seeming to keep alive a spirit of the thirties in Australian printmaking.

Col Brown's "Sparrow's Fart" won the Best Oil/Acrylic in the show: the finely nuanced colour and tone, sureness of paint handling, excellent drawing and settled planar composition all belie the rather prosaic taste of the implied "aussie" subject matter.

Before we arrived at the Quilting we walked past the Old Ballan Court House (now the Historical Society's HQ) probably built 1852 (?) ....nicely proportioned building.

At the quilting (about which I know as much as I do about "String Theory") I fell into conversation with one, Yvonne Sebire and her friend who began to elucidate the finer points of both quilting and patchwork.. particularly the Japanese criteria that the stitches are one grain of rice in length and that measure apart, too.

To me it's that sense of humanity that makes art


Yvonne's quilting work is on the left a piece by Di Paul

Yvonne with the quilt designer Pam Ludge

....the detail in these works was exquisite the upper work being Koi and the quilting literally being the waves they make whilst the lower piece had finely drawn (sewn leaves) see detail below, lovely stuff and thank you ladies for the conversational lesson.