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The Bundeena Art Trail

Enjoy a day out with the ART TRAIL in Bundeena on the first Sunday of every month. There are eleven open studio-galleries including double Sulman prize winning artist Bob Marchant. You can talk to the artists, see work in progress, take in the studio atmosphere or make a purchase. Artist work includes painting drawing ceramics, sculpture, mixed media and more! Just a 20 minute ferry trip from Cronulla or drive via the Royal National Park. Map and details at: www.arttrail.com.au

Bundeena Maianbar Art of Living Festival

The Bundeena Maianbar Art Of Living Festival has been running since 1995. Each year the festival is planned, organised and run by a committee of local residents who volunteer their time to help make this a great annual event on the local calendar.

The Festival aims to promote the local musicians and artists within our community providing them with an opportunity to showcase their talents to the wider community.

This year Bob Marchant exhibited 2 works - both painted on hand made paper and framed.

Christie's Auction Results, London

On 18 December 2012 Bob Marchant's painting "Peter Langan's feast for David Hockney at Glyndebourne to celebrate the first night of the "The Rake's Progress" sold at auction for the record price of £40,850 ($66,136)

Sale 4079/Lot 9 notes - In 1974 David Hockney accepted the commission, by John Cox, to design the costumes and set for Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress to be performed at the Glyndebourne Festival.
In honour of this event Peter Langan organised a magnificent picnic to celebrate the opening night on 21st June 1975. Sir George Christie had agreed to take over the front lawn at Glyndebourne where he set up a long table with a white linen tablecloth, candelabra and cut flowers. Cuban waiters served champagne and menus were distributed depicting Hockney's drawing of Langan and Moussis with the inscription An Evening of Excess.
Hockney recalls "The picnic was supposed to be for about thirty people, but Peter took 120 bottles of champagne and none went back. I did point out to him, 'That's four bottles each, Peter!' The food was fantastic, enormous lobsters, best hams, marvelous smoked salmon - he knew where to get the good stuff. It was spectacular." (C.S. Sykes, David Hockney, A Rake's Progress, The Biography, 1937-1975, New York 2011, p. 325-326)
The present work was executed by the Australian artist Robert Marchant and the figures of Peter Langan, David Hockney and Henry Geldzahler are clearly depicted in the centre of the banquet. It was purchased by Richard Shepherd who gave it to Peter as a present.

Recent exhibition: The Red Earth

Bob Marchant's exhibition "The Red Earth Series" is being held at the Australian Galleries,15 Roylston Street, Paddington, NSW. Opening on Tuesday 27 November 2012 at 6-8pm (Previews Saturday 24 & Sunday 25 November). The gallery is open 7 days a week from 10am to 6pm and the exhibiton will run until 16th of December.

Unlike actors that learve their handprints in wet cement on a footpath in Hollywood Boulevard, Marchant has decided to leave his mark in oil paint and to record his life's experiences in the land he loves.

In his earlier works it was large crowds of people in cities who dominated the Australian landscape that won him two Sulman Prizes. Now as he ages the people are still there but becoming less important. Now it is the wide open spaces of Australia's desert areas. The vastness of big skies, the flora and fauna and the colours of nature that are slowly taking over and becoming the subject matter of his paintings.

In his latest series "The Red Earth" it's the richness of warm reds, burnt orange and ochres gradually built up by overlaying many thin layers of paint that make his colours vibrant and his style of painting so recognisable and distinctive.

Visit the Australian Galleries website for more information.

Recent exhibitions: The Drovers Boy

Bob Marchant’s exhibition ‘The Drovers Boy’ is his retelling of Ted Egan’s song of exploItation & redemption. Being held at The Stockman’s Hall of Fame, Longreach, QLD, it opened Wednesday 1st August 2012.

Bob Marchant’s forthcoming show The Drovers Boy at the Hugh Sawrey Gallery is his 25th solo exhibition. A prolific artist, Marchant’s up-coming exhibition consists of 14 large paintings, each telling a verse from the haunting song exposing the well known but rarely voiced fact that some of the stockmen of the outback were in fact young Aboriginal women dressed up as boys.

Bob explains, “It’s about the dark side of this country’s history. ‘The Drovers Boy’ was a slang term given to the aboriginal women who were kidnapped from their tribe.. and made to spend the rest of their childbearing days as the slave and bedmate of the dominant white drover. It’s a sad story yet one that must not be forgotten”.

Bob Marchant's "The Drovers Boy" was on exhibition from 1st - 31st of August 2012 at the Stockman's Hall of Fame, Longreach QLD.
http://www.outbackheritage.com.au/events1.aspx?eventID=77

Ted Egan talks about the writing of a song

"I am often asked how long it takes to write a song? In the case of my song The Drover's Boy, the answer is fifteen years and ten minutes.

I knew what I wanted to say, for I had met lots of old Aboriginal women on the big cattle emoires in the north, wearing broad-brimmed hats, sitting in the dust, smoking pipes, and looking out to the horizon with that far-seeing look that tells you they understand the big distances, the dry stages.

When I asked how they had spent their younger days, the women often replied, 'I was a stockman.' These women had obviously played such an important role in Australia's pastoral history, and I wanted to pay tribute to them, in the hope that this role might at least be recognised, if not honoured.

I had heard and read of the many instances where white men had taken Aboriginal women, sometimes forcibly, as their companions, and I knew that the crude bush term for such women was 'stud.'

I was aware that many 'studs' had been treated brutally, that laws had been passed to 'protect' the women from such exploitation; and I knew that many women had been masqueraded as males in order that their 'owners' could circumvent the law and keep the women for themselves.

Yet I had met many people who were the progeny of such unions, and there was occasionally talk of love and respect between their parents, the white man and the enslaved black women.

The harsh Australian bush is full of such paradoxes.
One day in 1981 I was sharing a pleasant lunch in Alice Springs with my mate Peter Forrest, a fine historian.
We talked of our various projects, and Peter asked 'Are you writing and songs lately?'

I mentioned a couple of ideas I had 'on the go' and then said, 'I've had for ages an idea for a song about Aboriginal woman. You know the type. Dressed up in trousers and shirt. Big hat. Great horserider. Hair cut short.
'She's called Johnny to confuse the traps, or to stop some other white bloke from pinching her.'
'Oh,' Peter mused, the drover's boy.'
The Drover's Boy!
I'd met the women, but I'd never heard them referred to as 'drover's boys' before.
I said to him, 'Peter, I've got to leave you, right now, but I'm buying you the most expensive port on the wine list before I go.'

I raced home, and in ten minutes I had written the song whose words and tune I had wrestled with for fifteen years."