As the crowd listens to speeches and breathlessly awaits the announcement of the winner of this year’s Wyndham Art Prize… 

 

….we’ll show you a few of our favourites on the night…

We loved Gaida Cirulis’s felt ‘pelt’, entitled On the Fringe (it had already been snapped up before we got there – bummer!)

                                        

…and in the primary school section, Beach Girl and the masks (shades of the Mexican wrestling variety) were the stand-outs (unfortunately the list of young exhibitors wasn’t available, so we can’t tell you the names of the kids…)

                              

                              

 

…and it was great to see such a strong photomedia section, which included a number of works by Paula Tallen, one of which was a ripper silk screen of Bob…

 

                                 

 

…and we really liked Mark McKenna’s Bronte Beach (a forerunner of Cronulla, perhaps)

 

                        

We must confess to being more than a little surprised to see that a lot of the work wasn’t recent – not quite sure what that signifies, perhaps they just wanted to open the show to potentially ‘better’ work…

This isn’t a negative per se, but it’s certainly a more common practice to stipulate that work be made within 12 months of a show. Not that you’d hear too many artists complaining, mind you – nothing like giving an old work another run, especially if it hasn’t been seen in the vicinity before.

Megsie didn’t put in a piece, she was up to the clackers moving house and had a number of writing deadlines looming…(though if she’d known that old work was acceptable, she’d have slapped something in for sure.)

Joy of joys, Sue Rourke from the Rocky Hall Wine Company was there again, this time with a verdelho and a shiraz. Seriously good – and they’re about to open a mail order service (with a drop off to the Wyndham store.) Can’t get much better than that!

Anyhoo it was a very pleasant evening all round and an opportunity to catch up with the odd old pal (except there seemed to be a bit of a dearth of the ridgy-didge locals, which is always a bit worrisome.) We were particularly delighted to run into Caroline (who we did etching with, as a sub-major, at our old alma mater, the ANU School of Art) and hubby John who now have a property out at Rocky Hall. For the time being they’re still just coming down from Canberra for odd weekends – but it’s very encouraging to see the sign of a future build-up in our local arts community.

The other highlights of the night were May’s specky flower arrangements. For more snaps of the show (and the Wyndham A-list crowd!!) go here.

Stop press: the prize went to a work we hadn’t photographed, Don Berendsen’s digital print 4079.7926.