Posts by Joe Wylie
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Isn't it rather muddying the waters to introduce the case of the teenage father into the discussion about Wilson? Especially as he's been selected as a poster person by Sensible Sentencing. The horrible outcomes of people who are essentially children having children - and given the often ghastly consequences there's nothing cute or innocent about that - is a world away from the unrepentant Wilson's refusal to engage with society on anything but his own terms.
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Speaker: Selling the Dream: The Art of…, in reply to Peter Alsop,
Went tonight to see a chap Gerald Phillips that silk screened many Tourist Department posters, a real craftsman.
Wonderful to hear that there's someone who remembers how these things were made. So glad that you're able to record his experience.
Told of the pain of the National Publicity Studio being shut down, and the wholesale trashing of much of the work …. Where oh where were the museum curators?
I think it was 1979 or 1980 when I was given the heads up about a skipful of stuff sitting in the rain outside the Auckland City Mission. There was an enormous stash of silk-screened travel posters depicting mostly Asian parts of the British Empire, I took away a vanload when it had been already well picked over and found some beauties. The enormous See India depicting the ghats of Varanasi on fabric-backed paper is amazing, with easily 19 separate screens.
Collot’s signature was also a stencil, and you would swear in the flesh it was hand written on with a fine nibbed Watermen pen …. The stencil cut is that refined and that good, the most curvacious, smooth curves you can image. Hand cut with a knife!
Being old enough to remember the intricacies of frisket-cutting for airbrush work, as well as a bit of silk screen, I can relate to that. Of course you can still spend as much on a jewel-bearinged swivel knife as you can on a fine pen, but the craftsmanship, sometimes achieved with just a straight scalpel type blade, was often breathtaking.
These guys were good, real, real good – we overlook the technical craft in these images in today’s photoshop cloning retouching world.
We do, though those "guys" were working within a style, usually heavily derived from photography, that imposed a characteristic look upon their work. Apart from the refined stencil cutting, their real artistry lay in extracting the maximum impact from the range of tones at their disposal. While Photoshop's no less of a challenge to anyone's creativity, unlike the art of the serigraph the best work usually isn't apparent in the end result.
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Speaker: Selling the Dream: The Art of…, in reply to Jonathan Ganley,
Flying to Sydney by Solent would have been all right . . .
Apparently the approach was really low - so low that the first sighting of Australia was the towering sandstone cliffs of Sydney, as described by Ruth Park in A Fence Around the Cuckoo. Unlike her earlier arrival by ship in indifferent weather, she remembered those welcoming sunlit cliffs as her first sighting of the elusive "Australia Felix".
When I lived on Sydney's Cremorne Point in the 70s the Lord Howe Island service still operated from Rose Bay. The Sunderland would sometimes glide overhead with the engines off as it made its night-time approach. You could see individual faces gazing from the lit windows.
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The rain-bloated Heathcote.
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Downloaded from Gudrun Gisela's Coolpix - Waimea Terrace, Beckenham, yesterday:
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Speaker: Selling the Dream: The Art of…, in reply to Hebe,
the chiefs and their heads, portraits, images of taonga all are off my list of poster-appropriate.
How about these postage stamps from 1980? There was some controversy at the time about depicting the moko of the departed in that context, but the issue went ahead.
I don't know much about the artist R M Conly, apart from his being a prolific stamp designer, and an official artist with the air force. His mail carrier from 1955 is rather nice for its time.
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Jos,
I think it's called dog wood
Chaenomeles, commonly aka'd japonica. My mum's generation used the "apples" from the bushes as a source of pectin to make jams and marmalades set.
Love them gulls too.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Chris Waugh,
just how much the National Party has in common with the CCP, especially in its attitude to its subjects.
How about the justice precinct, touted as "stimulating recovery by supporting retail and commercial activity in the central area." Kind of a combination of vacation lands for lawyers in love, with Mega City One style cubes to complement the cursed earth of the "frame".
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to JacksonP,
It's over the road from a pub, more or less.
I once stayed in that pub. Arrived after dark, pissing with rain. Woke to a beautiful dawn and a view of the waterfall, thought i was hallucinating. Still don't understand why it isn't famous, right in town like that.
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Intermission ice cream time at Levin's long-vanished Regent. Despite the date range given I reckon it's very early 60s. Patricia with the lovely smile at lower right was in my class at primary.
