Showing posts with label moderne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label moderne. Show all posts

Friday, 9 May 2014

A Brief Holiday

Through the grainy, hyper-coloured lens of Harinezumi

My partner and I have just returned from a short holiday to Melbourne.   We drove along the Great Ocean Road, which has to be one of the world's great coastal drives, and I took along my bag of cameras, including the Harinezumi.  This little toy digital camera has a number of effects but they all come out looking roughly like a super 8 film, faded or saturated with time. 

We arrived in Melbourne via Geelong.  I hadn't been to Geelong before, and I loved it.  It had a lot of great domestic architecture and was very atmospheric.  I felt the past, being in Geelong.  Of particular note was the Eastern Beach precinct.   It was a dream for nostalgics, with sweeping lawns, a brilliant blue paddling pool, handsome red brick kiosks, brightly coloured picnic seating and, best of all, a whimsical fountain of joy!   The fountain itself was wonderful to look at, with lots of shells and stylised dolphins, but surrounding these were four large water birds standing on turtles!


We also visited the Heide Museum of Modern Art.  There was a wonderful exhibition of work by Emily Floyd called "Far Rainbow".  The exhibition was made up of a number of different media; prints, wood sculptures, a slide show, even grass matting!  I thought it captured an idyllic early 1970s feel with its primary colours and wooden toy-like shapes.  Of course, there is a more substantial reading of the work, but you can find this out for yourself here!  The two snaps below were taken at the exhibition (no flash, of course).




Saturday, 23 February 2013

Bookshop find

During a recent holiday up north, we visited a wonderful bookshop in Kingscliff.  It was old school so far as bookshops go, so there was much to find there.   I came away with a couple of design books from the 1940s including this modest little number "Design in Everyday Things", published by the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1941. 


The book was an accompaniment to a series of educational lectures broadcasted on the ABC radio.   It has a number of thought-provoking essays on design, but it is the illustrations, advertisements and photographs which interested me.  

Being a big fan of moderne, streamline, art deco architecture, I zeroed in on these images in particular.


 


The first is an illustration in an advertisement for International Correspondence Schools (Australasia) Pty Ltd.  The photo is unidentified and uncredited.

The second breaks my heart.  It is identified as Wyldefel Gardens, a block of flats in Potts Point, Sydney.  In 1941, they were being demolished to make way for a new Naval Dock.  Imagine the views!




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