The Etruscans have fascinated ancient authors and scholars from as early as the first century AD and much of this interest is due to the sophistication of their culture — reached so early, their influence (felt long after their demise) and the mystery that followed their fall [  View article  ]

In recent years, as our younger artists welcome elements of design into their visual concepts, young designers are also allowing theories of art to enhance their designs [  View article  ]

Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence accompanied The Phillips Collection exhibition (June 2011). The book surveys the creative process leading up to the creation of Kandinsky’s 1913 masterpiece Painting with White Border (Moscow), now in the Guggenheim’s collection [  View article  ]

For those partial to superstition, the spilling of salt at a table is an omen of bad fortune — think of Judas Iscariot in da Vinci’s The Last Supper — that can only be remedied by a pinch of it tossed with the right hand over the left shoulder into the face of the devil waiting there. The works of recent exhibition Still Life: The Food Bowl — made entirely of salt pumped out of the ground of the Murray-Darling Basin — too, were omens of misfortune current and to come. [  View article  ]

Fixing a likeness of someone has been with us for millennia. It gathered momentum with the unflinching realism of Roman portraiture in marble, where every furrowed brow and facial deformity was given exact expression, then it faltered for nearly 1000 years. Why? Christianity in Europe effaced the value of the individual in favour of anonymous generic worshippers with wide eyes and stylised features focused on heavenly rewards — in frescoes, in carvings and in stained glass windows. [  View article  ]

"Something serious needed to happen - the last Indigenous frontier was opening up." And perennial consultant Jonah Jones was just the man to make the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) happen to try to bring to the world's attention the burgeoning art of Torres Strait Islander and Cape York Indigenous artists. [  View article  ]

Positioned “on a threshold” is the way Sydney-based artist Deborah Marks explains her artistic practice. Although she has exhibited her work in many group shows since the 1980s, it was only this year that Marks held her first solo exhibition — the culmination of a Masters of Fine Arts degree at The National Art School. [  View article  ]

Wick spent many years living and working in South Korea, Hong Kong and Beijing. These experiences of a North Asian aesthetic, such as the structure, spare beauty and the exquisite form of functional objects, had a profound effect on her paintings. [  View article  ]

In Giacometti’s Studio is Michael Peppiatt’s second book on Giacometti. In it Peppiatt explores his personal feelings on the artist’s cramped, near forty-year studio, which he describes as crucible of his experiments [  View article  ]

Ange Leech works in the areas of sculpture, photography, collage and performance. Her work displays a delightful quirkiness and in the few short years since completing her studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2008, she has also demonstrated remarkable entrepreneurial skills [  View article  ]