From the Vault

I had my $10 op-shop Ricoh rangefinder, weighty in my pocket, way back in 2001.  The guard at the NGA let me take this photo without a flash.  I did and put the camera away and enjoyed the rest of the gallery without thinking of taking any more photos.  If there'd been a lot of people around, I wouldn't have done so but we seemed to be the only ones in the surrealism room of the National Gallery one chilly July Sunday morning.

Nowadays galleries are overrun by tourists with non-stop shutters and hipsters with fancy photophones ("fotofone" - have I coined a new word or overheard that somewhere?).

Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel - a combination of two useful objects, "readymade" put together to make them useless, thus, art

Image by Anne Bentley scanned from the original black & white negative, hand developed 2001, scanned 2010.

Leonora Carrington April 6 1917-25 May 2011

It's people like Leonora Carrington that make a case for immortality valid.

A wonderful, inspiring and insightful artist.

Coincidentally, I am reading her novel, The Hearing Trumpet at the moment - it's a small book and I am trying to stretch out the pleasure of being in her story even though it would be easy to read it in one sitting.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/may/26/leonora-carrington-obituary

there's a good documentary including an interview with Leonora Carringotn, aged 84 at this vimeo link: http://vimeo.com/10760131