Search / ralph hope-johnstone

The selfie stick

Last week ABC Television came to interview me about selfie sticks. The story was prompted by the announcement that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has lately prohibited the use of these inside their galleries. So far as I am aware we have not yet encountered the phenomenon, but no doubt we will before too long.

The intellectual larrikin

Barrie Cassidy pays textured tribute to the inimitable Bob Hawke.

Be frank

Close encounters are the genesis for Graeme Drendel’s enticing portraiture.

Portrait Donors

Annual Appeal

Citizen Kenne

April Thompson explores an exhibition of Ingvar Kenne’s global portrait project.

Inside outside

Michael Desmond explores the portraiture of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

Poets' Portraits

The Portrait Gallery's paintings of two poets, Les Murray and Peter Porter, demonstrate two very different artists' responses to the challenge of representing more than usually sensitive and imaginative men.

Arianne McNaught

An interview with the photographer.

A real Pratt

The death of a gentlewoman is shrouded in mystery, a well-liked governor finds love after sorrow, and two upright men become entangled in the historical record.

Boyd to man

Christopher Chapman looks at influences and insight in the formative years of Arthur Boyd.

Suave

Charles Haddon Chambers the Australian-born playboy playwright settled permanently in London in 1880 but never lost his Australian stance when satirising the English.

Clay, water, fire

Ah Xian's porcelain portrait of paediatrician Dr. John Yu reflects Yu's heritage and interests.

Stubbs and the horse

One of the chief aims of George Stubbs, 1724–1806, the late Judy Egerton’s great 1984–85 exhibition at the Tate Gallery was to provide an eloquent rebuttal to Josiah Wedgwood’s famous remark of 1780: “Noboby suspects Mr Stubs [sic] of painting anything but horses & lions, or dogs & tigers.”

Duty bound

Joanna Gilmour explores the life of colonial women Lady Ellen Stirling, Eliza Darling, Lady Eliza Arthur, Elizabeth Macquarie and Lady Jane Franklin.

FX Harsono

FX Harsono was born in 1949, just as the independence of the Indonesian nation was being established.