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December 1, 2008
I spent the weekend in Melbourne, flying in on Saturday morning and returning to Canberra on Monday evening. It was a work and family weekend with a Sunday lunch at a winery on the Mornington Peninsula.
I managed do some photography on Saturday morning before work. On Sunday morning I checked out the lanes ways before taking in the Andreas Gursky exhibition with Barbara Fischer from the Melbourne Flickr group and we shared a coffee afterwards. The time in the Melbourne CBD was all too short.
I only had little chance to do some photography at Safety Beach on the Mornington Peninsula. Melbourne for me is about the street life in the metropolis and the street art in the laneways, and, for some reason, I kept on thinking about Ernest Ludwig Kirchner's expressionist Berlin street paintings. It wasn't as if I was seeing the emerging urban ethos of surfacing repressed desire, primitive figurative form, style (hats, feathers and furs) or the decadence of modernity on the Melbourne streets:
Ernest Ludwig Kirchner, The Berlin Street, circa 1913--1915, Oil on canvas
Kirchner's paintings express the contradictions of the modern European city life in a period of rapid change and development. just before WW1. Nighttime and daytime glamour face loneliness and decadence, with prostitutes (Kokotten) present in many of his works of art. He expresses the raw energy, vitality and eroticism in the Berlin streets, coupled with feelings of alienation, which become a metaphor for the autonomous metropolitan life.
It was the sense of space (receding trriangles) and colours that came back to me---the pinks, greens and yellows and shades of charcoal black.
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No fully visible buildings are present in these paintings even though Kirchner trained as an architect. The two or three women in the foreground overshadow most of the street, and render the men as definitely auxiliary.