The ANL Maritime Art Awards & Exhibition features the winning artworks and all the short-listed entries. Three rooms of paintings at the Melbourne Mission to Seafarers Victoria at the far dockside end of Flinders Street. It is in the perfect location for the exhibition including exhibiting under the dome of the historic Spanish mission-style building.
Catherine Stringer, “Lost at Sea” (photo courtesy of Maritime Art Awards)
There are lots of paintings of container ships but it was not all traditional painting there is plenty of modern and contemporary art. “Lost at Sea” by Catherine Stringer is a haunting dress made of seaweed pulp in a shadow frame that refers to the convict women who drowned in a colonial shipwreck. This work won Stringer the Bendigo Wealth ‘Emerging Artist Award’.
The maritime theme includes more than just boats, there are whimsical paintings about the shore and social realism about nautical life.
I enjoyed the simplicity of Garry Arnephy’s mixed media work “Cargo” Appleton Dock, Melbourne, made of acetate and corrugated cardboard with a few little marks with paint and pencil.
Garry Arnephy, ‘“Cargo” Appleton Dock, Melbourne’, mixed media
With all that is going on in Melbourne art, readers may ask why reviewing an exhibition of maritime art? It is unfortunate, but true, that to produce great art you must not only be a good artist but create art that is significant and meaningful. For this reason John Stubbs is the greatest European painter of equestrian themes and I would be extremely surprised if a greater one emerged. The same will be true, with a different name, for Chinese or Japanese art, not because the artists aren’t as good but because the age of the horse is over.
Likewise, the greatest paintings of dogs and ships have already been painted. (I don’t have a favourite artist to cite for these examples.) However, there is still a demand for paintings of horses, dogs and ships and so there are still people who paint them. I noticed that there was an artist who painted dog portraits at Royal Melbourne Show.
I want to look at the long tail of these themes in art, not as anachronisms, but because they shows certain functional aspects of art. Not the simple functionalism of representation but how art functions in response to a theme and within a context where the theme is meaningful. People want art that celebrates, comments or records themes that are meaningful to them.
Black Mark 