looking at art

I like looking at art. 

I like going to the gallery to look at the pictures. I like to read the labels and learn about the context in which it was created. I like to look at the art again - see if reading the label has shifted the way I look. 

I’m tempted to give it a capital letter, ‘Art’, then think better of it. I don’t like it because it’s capital A ‘Art’. 

I enter into the hush. Notice how people move more slowly, put their hands behind the back in careful reverence. My steps slow. I stop and look. It makes me see things anew. It seems to open up spaces inside me.

On Sunday I went to the Art Gallery of NSW. I wanted to visit the Indigenous art collection, where Michael and I had gone together. We loved it. The 5 of us went together in October, 2023. After his diagnosis.

I parked the car and walked through the Domain, under the spreading fig trees. I  pass the sandstone colonnades of the old gallery, the bronze reliefs on the facades depicting Greek and Roman historical periods. I saw an ibis lifting its legs in the reflection pool.

Outside the new Naala Badu building I stopped and looked at the statues of friendly blue giants. I love the child giants with legs draped around the long torsos. Their giant elongated arms reach out to pile up big blue balls - playful and welcoming. The statues are called Here comes everybody (2022) The website says the artist, Francis Upritchard, ‘created these beings to greet you in this new cultural space, and to ready your mind for the new and unexpected.’ I hadn’t read this on Sunday, but I could feel my perception shift as I entered the space outside the gallery. 

There are crowds of people outside getting ready to celebrate the Lunar New Year. There are families - children dressed in red for good fortune. People in costume are getting ready for the festivities - the head of a lion rests on an outdoor bench. Young men wear plain black T shirts and elaborate pants with embroidered fringes. 

I go inside, past the gift shop and a kids’ activity station. Turn right to explore the Yiribana Gallery, which houses a collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art.

I came here with Michael when it first opened. I remember we loved the art that re-purposed metal signs, the fish traps and woven baskets. But both of us were particularly struck by a huge collection of blown glass yams, suspended from the ceiling, some in clear glass and some in black.

It was beautiful. Wonderful. We looked again, then read the inscription. It’s called Death Zephyr. 

Death Zephyr (2016) (detail). Hand-blown glass, nylon and steel, dimensions variable. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased with funds provided by the Aboriginal Art Collection Benefactors, 2017. © Yhonnie Scarce. Image © Art Gallery of New of New South Wales 14.2017.a-c.

We learn the work is by Yhonnie Scarce. The small glass yams represent people. The huge sweep of the work refers to the poisonous clouds that rained across Maralinga, SA. Michael often spoke of the nuclear testing that took place there in the 1950s and 1960. When Denise got sick with leukemia I remember him wondering if some of the radiation had made its way to the Riverina, blowing across the desert to poison the land in Temora. We both look up silently. We contemplate about the awful disdain for Aboriginal land, casual disregard for human life, heedless environmental destruction.  

and the art work is beautiful.

I subscribe to Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files. In the email I got yesterday, Cave writes about the purpose of art. He says art is, ‘something we approach with awe and wonder, that humbles us whilst also enlarging our hearts.’ (ISSUE #355 / FEBRUARY 2026) 

One of my favourite poems is by William Carlos Williams.

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

Chickens

‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by Christopher MacGowan. Copyright 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Public Domain.

I often use it in class. I ask the students to have a go at writing their own imagist poetry. I wonder if I can have a go now. Think about what I saw on Sunday.

so much depends upon

a white feathered ibis

black legs high stepping

beside the grey bin

No. That's not it.

so much depends upon

a child’s yellow crayon

rolled on the floor

beside the black shoes

I can't do it. There’s too much movement. Well, of course I can’t. It’s William Carlos Williams after all.

When Michael was sick I read All The Beauty in the World - The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley. It’s a beautiful memoir. After Bringley’s beloved older brother fell ill with cancer, he found his ritzy job in the New Yorker suddenly didn’t seem so exciting. On a whim, he applied for a position as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and spent the next 10 years standing still, surrounded by beautiful things. Bringley said, ‘There was nothing I was meant to do except keep my eyes open. A wave of freedom washed over me. In the stillness, my mind was able to wander.’

I loved the book but I didn’t really get it. When Michael was sick my life was focused on the essentials. Hospital rooms, medication schedules, cooking for the family, love. I thought I knew what was coming. I had no idea.

So now I look up from my computer and take a 5 minute break to look at the cabbage tree palm in the back yard.

I get up in time to drink my coffee slowly in the morning, trying not to look at my phone.

I resist the urge to fill up all the empty spaces with busy busy busy. 

so much depends

on a black leather wallet

layered with dust

beside the stopped watch.