When is a plywood board stuck to a tree trunk worth $30,000?
When it’s the subject of the winning entry in the 2018 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, of course!
Continuing with the region’s theme of off-beat arts, judges handed the cash prize to Melbourne’s Andrew Browne at Geelong Gallery last Friday for his “evocative, narrative-rich” painting The Awakening.
“Evocative” it certainly is, with its intriguing creepiness and all, but the casual observer might struggle to understand the “narrative-rich” bit.
Helpfully, the judges offered an explanation in their prize notes.
“This may be an image of the fate of painting, or a broader evocation of a world where troubling events transpire on the edge of our awareness,” they wrote.
Of course! And here we were thinking it was the back of an old rabbit-control sign on Belmont Common at night!
Anyway, locals are advised to get along to the gallery to inspect The Awakening and other art prize entries while they’re still broadly evoking assorted events.
A unique initiative road-tested last weekend has gone a modest way to helping Lorne overcome its winter tourism blues.
Foreshore manager Great Ocean Road Coast Committee managed to sell out its inaugural Glamping Fiesta, which, to be fair, coincided with the advantage of a long weekend and mild winter weather.
Forty fiesta campers did it somewhat less than tough at Lorne’s foreshore caravan park with luxury tents, fire pits, music, wine and gourmet meals, the committee said.
Chairman Ken Northwood was delighted with the result.
“Due to popular demand we will make this an annual offer at Lorne,” he declared.
Nice work, GORCC!
If the big banks aren’t on the nose enough already, one of them has turned up the stink-o-meter to 11 on the Bellarine Peninsula with another branch closure.
The Finance Sector Union of Australia revealed this week that ANZ had notified it that the Drysdale branch would close along with four others elsewhere in Victoria.
The bank had told Drysdale staff the doors would shut on 1 August, the union said, with their jobs either redeployed or made redundant.
The union was also concerned for the branch’s elderly customers, who typically prefer face-to-face banking over the trend toward online transactions.
The Drysdale announcement follows the closure of the ANZ’s Queenscliff branch two years back.
Thanks for nothing, ANZ. Local customers might like to return the favour with some withdrawals of their own.
