Adelaide Part Two - Art Treasures of Adelaide

On my other afternoon off I decided to go for a quick trip to the art gallery and look around the city.

I passed the parliament buildings for South Australia...

The Railway Station... 

Bronze pig sculptures on Rundle Mall...

The War Memorial...

and then arrived at the art gallery...

It was a lovely classical building in a sand stone. Below: The detailing around the front door... 

Some more detailing around the base of some columns and a flattened copper down pipe, recessed into the side of the building...

I like the way the down pipe goes under the frieze band.

It gave me an idea for WBP manor - the down pipe needs to do a zig zag from the guttering above to come down between the columns below. That zig zag is now going to happen behind the frieze line...

The inside the gallery comprised of the front rooms, which were very Victorian...

 

There were works of art depicting the aboriginal people...

and quite a few paintings of pastoral scenes...

Several 18th century and 19th century paintings of classical subjects...

I liked the painting above most of all. If you looked closely apart from the main subject of the painting, there were other things happening around the canvas...

There were examples of colonial furniture...

and gold and silver pieces...

The piece above was odd, it was a cup, whose base depicted an aboriginal man chasing an emu, with two kangaroos mating! But that was not the only strange thing in the gallery. There were also several unusual modern pieces. I'll let you decide on their artistic merit. There was a tattooed hermaphroditic sculpture with a head like Winston Churchill...

A skeleton carved out of wood...

But strangest of all, a giant headless taxidermied horse strung up by its back legs!

The Bronzes: Below is a bronze called the three shades, an original Rodin. I think the subject is a nice counterpoint to the very common subject of the three graces...

There was also a bronze of St Sebastian...

and of the flagellation...

In the last room were art works lit with spot lights on black walls. Here are some striking Chinese golden panels...

and then some very imaginative shadow puppetry. There was a silhouette of a man and a woman's head cast upon the wall by some deftly assembled twigs...

Adelaide Part One...

After a very lovely cocktail party, I arose early to fly down to Adelaide via Sydney. Having gone a little cabin crazy in Dubbo I couldn't wait to get out of the place. And I had never been to Adelaide before, so I was looking forward to that as well.

The trip was not too bad, and the stop over not too long. When I got to Adelaide Peter was waiting for me at the airport. His plane had arrived earlier in the day. We made our way into town, by which time there was an hour to turn ourselves around before getting to finally meet the marvelous Millie and magnanimous MOTH for the first time.

We had a great evening, starting off with a few cocktails in the new 'The Collins' bar and getting to know each other before the very gracious M&M took us out to a beautiful restaurant called Georges. The food there was divine, and the wine even better. We had a couple of bottles of superb local Shiraz to complement the modern European cuisine.

Above: MOTH, Millie, Myself and Peter crammed in like sardines on a two-seater couch in the Hilton bar.

It was a truly lovely night and we can't wait to do it all again sometime soon. But the hospitality did not end there. The next day we went to meet the friends of a mutual friend who live just outside the city. We were invited to stay for lunch and got talking and hit it off, and so we made plans to dine together later in the week: we went out to Brighton Beach and had a walk along the sand at sunset and then dinner at a seaside brasserie.

Above: Sunset that night, with Brighton Pier just visible in the background to the left

The next day the ACEM Annual Scientific Meeting started off with a bang. The conference started with all the new fellows receiving their Testamurs, inc yours truly...

Then there was a welcome cocktail party with fresh local foods, inc. an oyster bar, free flowing bubbles and some rather unusual entertainment...

I decided the only way to get over my [rather healthy] fear of snakes was to pet one!

After a few days of concentration at the conference, I decided to take the afternoon off and go with a colleague to another beach, Glen Elg...

As you can see, Adelaide had put on a some truly glorious weather for us...

whilst back home WBP was not seeing such good weather...

Later on that evening was the gala dinner, a lovely a la carte affair with a few wines and again, unusual entertainment. There was a troop of female burlesque magicians!...

The conference was also a chance for me to catch up with dear friends and colleagues from New Zealand who, I must say, I miss very much...

In part two I will share my stroll around Adelaide looking at the architecture and the Art Gallery of South Australia.