NPG

The new National Portrait Gallery opened a couple of weeks ago in Canberra. I took two of the children.

The car park is very fine, however it should be visited soon, or you will not get the benefit of the surface which is texture dependent. Visiting earlyish in the morning I could drive around squealing the tires (sic) merrily, it sounded just like a car chase in a US movie of the 1970s.

The building itself is not very impressive, though I think it was designed to be that way, it is reminiscent of a municipal building of a largish town, it certainly does not have the same national significance or drama as do the other buildings within its vicinity. It is nothing like the Colin Madigan designed brutalist concrete structures on either of its sides, here everything is mediated with wood.

One design feature of note were the narrow passages between galleries, so you could slip easily from one to the other (there were also normal wide openings at each end of the rooms as well) but these were a nice touch.

The paintings are unfortunately generally mediocre, and there are far too many staid pictures of the boring and now dead wealthy, politicians and lawyers. However there are a few that make the trip worthwhile. Hung together there is a group of four smallish very very fine portraits by Tom Roberts, which were beautifully painted on wood panels. There is also the portrait of Deborah Mailman painted on jute sacking.

There was a multimedia section where two videos played, in one was a short film featuring Cate Blanchett. I have never been a fan of her acting, but here in a work choreographed by Lucy Guerin she danced, and thus I have a new found respect and admiration. The film was undermined by Blanchett’s voice over, but by not listening and just watching the dance, I was most entranced.

The cafe, I saw but did not enter (small fries $5). The shop had a good range of general art books as well as some theory and philosophy. I looked through a book of Tracey Emin’s works, however unfashionable she may have become, her works remain beautiful, but the book was too expensive, and Santa had to buy daughter #2 one of those hardcover drawing/writing books that are made to look like old leather bound volumes.