What makes art truly great? What gives it the power to move us, to linger in our minds long after we’ve seen it? There’s something universal in the way we respond to beauty, to grand vistas, and mystery. Something that…
Several years ago, I picked up In Praise of Shadows, an essay by Japanese author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. At the time, I couldn’t grasp its significance, but the opening passages lingered with me. The essay begins with Tanizaki’s musings on the…
We are entering an era of upheaval that some are calling the fourth industrial revolution.[1] The rise of artificial intelligence, and in particular generative art, threatens to upend our social and cultural landscape, leading to a renewed conflict between mechanical…
We imagine artists as pure beings, in some ways above the forces of the market or the capitalistic imperatives of our society. Those who seek to make money from art are sell outs. By contrast, true artists, the theory goes,…
If we are lucky in our lives, we come across artists who are always paying attention, whose vibrant paintings bring to life the world in a way we have never seen before. They see the everyday; the objects, food and…
For the last few months, I’ve been working on a hobby project to recreate, loosely speaking, the suburb of Glebe in Sydney in 3D. The original idea was to capture the essence of the suburb without necessarily making a one-to-one…
In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway visited the galleries of Paris to see the works of Paul Cezanne, a painter who had an incredible impression on him. He later said of these visits: I was learning something from the painting of…