Street Rhythm Exhibition

Come along to a solo exhibition of some works that I have created during my time at the Glen Huntly Studio.

The pieces in this show will span both the urban portraits and the local street scenes that are around me in my day to day environment.

Whilst there is a focus on urban rhythms within my neighbourhood there is also a focus on the painterly rhythms that I have explored during this time.

Developing both compositions and painterly techniques has been a steady learning process during this time, and trying to contain my zest for colour and movement can be a challenge.

I hope that my exhibition ‘Street Rhythm’ reflects something of the curiosity I feel in noticing the various personalities an urban environment has to offer; in the character of its people, the activity at different times of the day, a suburb at night or a city celebrating sport.

‘Street Rhythm’ is a subject that has many layers and one that I have only just touched on here.

Street Rhythm Exhibition

Chapel Off Chapel Foyer Gallery

12 Little Chapel St,

Prahran

Opens 21st May 2019 until 9th June

Open Daily 12pm - 5pm

Photos from the opening night.

A wonderful evening.

Street Rhythm

Exhibition of paintings by Kate Birrell

21stMay 2019 – 9thJune 2019

Chapel off Chapel Foyer Gallery

Prahran

Artist Statement 

Street Rhythm is a collection of works that I have done over the last few years. These paintings reflect upon my time working from a studio based in the Melbourne suburb of Glen Huntly.

 The exhibition follows both the rhythms of the street that I have observed, and have been immersed within, as well as the rhythms of my own painterly inclinations.

 I am interested in people and character and the various ways in which they interact with their urban environment, be it at work or leisure or some other daily occupation.

 I am interested in people just as they are, and therefore often rely on the quick snap shot on a mobile phone in order to capture an individual in their moment.

 As a regular walker I find most of my inspiration for subject matter is held within the various things that I come across when I am out on the street, walking to keep fit, or just walking to get somewhere.

Various things such as interactions between friends or family heading out to the footy; things such as the multitude of ways in which a trio of schoolgirls can occupy a footpath in a suburban shopping strip, or perhaps the way in which someone may stand at a train station, or a set of traffic lights, waiting for a train or a friend, or for the lights to change.

These are moments within which often lie curious and interesting narratives that simmer below the surface appearance of our day to day lives in this city of Melbourne.

My goal is to continue developing my painting techniques so as to better unite my compositions, and through my love of color and line extend upon the visual narratives that I have looked at here in this exhibition Street Rhythm.

Thank you for visiting Chapel Off Chapel to see this exhibition.

Kate Birrell

www.katebirrell.com

katebirrellpaintings@gmail.com

Instagram sketchbook @lookatmelbourne 

Facebook @katebirrellpaintings

122 Grange Rd

I was delighted to have been asked by the owners of this property to paint this beautiful Federation weatherboard house.

The house is located at the Junction of Grange and Glen Huntly Roads, Glen Huntly. It was built around 1910 and would have been one of the first clusters of residential homes built at the end of the commercial shopping strip that we know today as Glen Huntly. To know more about Glen Huntly’s history go here

The home would have been occupied as such until sometime in the late 1960’s when it was converted into the local Post office. I don’t have any recollections of this, but do recall its subsequent use as a nursery for many years in the !990’s and beyond.

I have added some added interest by way of portraying the owners daughter walking the family dog pass the building.

The painting is hanging in the Grange Junction Cafe; 122 Grange Rd, Glen Huntly.

#lookatglenhuntly

#Lookatglenhuntly is a series of ink and watercolour work on paper currently up at The Bar Royal as part of the Walkabout Glen Huntly street photography exhibition.

Most of these pieces have been done on location using an ink brush pen, or if I had the patience, a bottle of ink and a sable brush. The sable brush is the most effective way to work but it isn't always practical when out of the studio.

I painted on location at Platform 3 on Glen Huntly station looking toward Platform 2 over a couple of days last week.

Others I did from the table inside my studio on Glen Huntly Rd. which looks onto the street and the Royal Avenue corner. I look for interesting and fleeting moments of being.

Go to the Gallery page to see the full series titled Look at Glen Huntly. Or got my shop if you would like to purchase one.

Installation of work at The Bar Royal

And #lookatglenhuntly...why? 

I have asked myself why... why is there an urge to observe and record. What is the point and what does one get from the process of either drawing or painting people going about their daily lives.

For my part, I find it is a way to slow things down, to distill 'micro-moments' of existence, perhaps, to see what they do look like....it is an extension beyond the ordinary.

In looking at these fleeting moments, quite often, the surprising hits upon you, compelling the artist in me, to stay and look further or deeper. Surprising moments in colour, shape, and human drama; surprising for the moments of touching beauty, banal mundanity, intriguing transactions or for just delighting in the comedy of human theatre in the public space.

Much can happen.

Glen Huntly, the suburb, is a space whose urban facade has changed rapidly in a relatively short period of time. As a local moving into the area 20 years ago the nature of the businesses and the pedestrian life has undergone considerable change.

My neighbour Vera, who only recently died, grew up in the area from the early 1920's often remarked that for a long period of time this shopping strip had "everything you could ever need". There was no need to travel to another shopping strip , or mall, to get items needed for daily life...be it groceries, smallgoods, hardware, children clothes, ladies wear, theatre...Glen Huntly had it all.

The theatre was a popular spot for Vera and her friends on Saturday afternoons when she was a young girl; It was located on the site of our Safeway supermarket. For a number of years in the late 1950,s Vera and her husband also ran a business selling jewellery, clock making and in providing watchrepairs.

By the time I settled in the late 1990's change was underway. However, Glen Huntly still had two green grocers ( one on both sides of the railway line), one butcher, Clarke's (or Nick's as we called it), a haberdashery store (a long skinny shop jam packed with bags of wool, cotton needles etc), a hardware store, two cake shops, three chemists, a fish and chippery and a smattering of antique stores, to name just a few notables.

The only cafe at this time was Charlotte's, the French Patisserie. Nancy and Sharon worked the counter serving delectable chocolate eclairs, lattes and babychinos for the kids.

Today, our shopping centre is without a stand alone greengrocer, nor is there a haberdashery, nor hardware store. Op shops and brotherhoods have replaced the antique dealers, and a tobacco business occupies the jewellery store that my neighbour Vera once ran (a shopfront just down from where Woodards is now).

But we do have a Hallal butcher, several Indian and Chinese grocery stores, multicultural restaurants, many cafes and a brilliant new playground within our midst.

The council seems to be more open in their approach to enhancing our locality and there is an ongoing discussion regarding the level crossing. Traffic, or the delays to the flow of traffic due to the crossing are a significant impediment to vehicular movement in the strip.

Pedestrian life is always evolving and with societal issues such as drugs and homelessness, Glen Huntly is not immune to the travesties of life. But with the recent waves of migration and the influx of new residents settling in our suburb to work, study or live, our strip is also seeing new faces full of hope and anticipation for lives just beginning.

Today in Glen Huntly we have rich and diverse community adding depth and a great splash of colour to what I would term 'the Look of Melbourne'.

It is a suburb that epitomises Melbourne's rapidly increasing population and shifting cultural demographic.

#lookatglenhuntly...that's why.

For more Glen Huntly musings read on here Glen Huntly and Mysteries of the Track

The Walkabout Glen Huntly Exhibition is on now and until May the 6th 2018

The Bar Royal

1 Royal Avenue, Glen Huntly

from 4pm Monday - Friday and from 1pm Saturday and Sunday

Mysteries of the Track

It’s Friday night, Derby Day eve.

I’m no punter, yet I love a racecourse. It is a mystery to me, I know.

I like the look of the racecourse, the open space, the greenery of the turf and the white railings circling the tracks.

I like the city track for its urbanity. The distant CBD, its buildings, its cranes, its smog and its blue-grey haze.

I like the commission flats rising up like pop up sprinklers above a flat botanic lawn; they are all beige and boxy; and a bit eastern European in appearance. They guard the perimeter of the Flemington track at odd intervals in the neighbouring suburbs of Kensington and North Melbourne.

I like the Queens Avenue Californian bungalows of Caulfield East, with their second storey bay windows and terracotta roofs peering down onto the far side of The Heath. The avenue meets with the Monash University block and the Metro towers running wires and persons along the Cranbourne, Frankston and Pakenham lines.

I like the members lawn at Caulfield on Cup Day. It is sheltered from the gusty Spring winds and the crush of the outside crowds, albeit, wilting in the sun as the day progresses, and sprawling their fluid limbs across plantar boxes filled with marigolds and the plastic turf of the ground below as the day draws to a close.

I like the fact that a racecourse predates our Southern Cross and Spencer Street stations. Races on Batman’s Hill in a city barely named, let alone formed.

I like the country racetrack, with its low horizon and wide open skies; and the Black Angus studded across the granite soils in the background; and ochre wheat fields and paddocks of grazing ewes and gum trees and dust, and car park mud too; or not, depending on when and where you are, of course.

I like the architecture of the stands, ornate filigree and long wooden benches stepping upwards; the stewards towers and the finishing posts; especially those in the shape of the horseshoe – and the ads; Elders always, the local real estate agents, financial advisors and beer, naturally.

I like the Schweppes Ad at Kilmore.

I like the chrome green John Deere tractors lined up in the middle of a track way out west.

And the country girls with contours in all shapes, colour and dress, lining up for fashion on the fields, waiting to be judged by the owner of the nearest ladies fashion boutique. As judge for the day, she is demure in her refinery and ready for the responsibility she has at hand.

I like listening to the call of a race, on a radio…..I don’t know why.

I like a torrential downpour at St.Arnaud, where everyone one runs to the betting ring for cover.

I like being at Towong when the skies are blue and the sun is shining and news of a ferocious storm ripping through a Flemington meeting filters through; the horses disappeared from the racecallers view, so the crowd at Towong said, and the meeting had to be abandoned.

I like the shady Oak trees at Woolamai in March, and the blazing heat and dust of Dederang in January.

I like sitting on a rug on the grass with my kids, especially when they were little, sleepy and dozing off in the open air.

I like the story of Phar Lap. He was shot at, so the papers said, in a Glen Huntly street on Derby Day 1930. My neighbour was about ten. She remembers the day. Her friend saw it all.

And Feathers, the man up the road, so named for the brightly coloured feathers adorning his hat; his horse trainer grandfather found the cartridge wadding from the shooting. It says so in a book titled A Century Galloped By. He takes me to the page where his grandfather is named in print.

I like the colour and the character of people, all mixed in together, slipping between the veiled layers of place, time and memory.

I like the loneliness, and the camaraderie.

I like the mystery of it all.

Image: Shooting in Etna Street

ink and watercolour on paper

Kate Birrell 2016

Published on the Footy Almanac site here

Glen Huntly

Like many of us, I am often curious as to who we are and where we came from. So its probably no surprise that I have often wondered…why is Glen Huntly called Glen Huntly?.

Glen Huntly is the suburb in which I live. For years I have walked up and down Glen Huntly Road for whatever reason; walking kids in prams, taking them to school, going to the shops, the station etc. On most of these occasions I have walked past the local supermarket with the big metal ship covered in pigeon poo on the wall and the big steel anchor lying on its side up on the corner of Grange Road.

…. I guess I knew our suburbs name had something to do with a ship, but that was about it. I was ignorant and oblivious to the history of our suburbs name.

Glen Huntly was a barque sailing vessel; an emigrant bounty ship that departed Greenock Scotland in December 1839 on her maiden voyage. It arrived four and a half months later in Melbourne on the 17th April 1840. 

The ship departed Scotland with 157 passengers; some were self-funded, others were sponsored by early settlers already living in the colony. These emigrants were seeking to escape a life of poverty and to reestablish themselves in this 'new' nation where they and their skills would be of value to those intent on building a city on the banks of the Yarra. John Batman and his party had only made a claim upon this land five years earlier. Prior to, and at this time, aboriginal people occupied this area. The city we now know as Melbourne barely existed.

The journey, however, was frought with illness. It is thought that Typhus and Small pox spread throughout the ship causing the deaths of ten people during the voyage.

As the ship entered Hobsons bay it flew the yellow flag at its mast, declaring itself to be a 'fever ship'. As a result the ship was ordered to land at Little Red Bluff, St.Kilda, now known as Point Ormond, where a makeshift quarantine station was set up. This area had not been settled by colonial settlers at this stage and so it was at a sufficient distance from the growing city of Melbourne to prevent further spread of disease. 

All passengers were quarantined until June 1840. Two camps were set up; one for the healthy and the other for those suffering from 'Fever'. A further three deaths occurred here, making a total of thirteen for the voyage.

Glen Huntly was only one of the thousands of emigrant ships to make such a journey during the mid 1800's. One can only barely imagine now, how arduous these journeys must have been for their passengers and crew. Overcrowded ships, poor quality of food, confined women and poor medical attention; the constant threat of illness, death and even shipwreck out in the middle of nowhere.

The high hopes and expectations of these new settlers must surely have been challenged throughout the trip and I can only speculate that a certain level of personal courage and fortitude sustained all those on board.

If my calculations are correct it will be 175 years in April 2015 since Glen Huntly sailed into Little Red Bluff thereby forging the roots of our suburb, or village, as it is now known, of Glen Huntly.

There were a couple of varying figures regarding the number of passengers and the number of deaths (thirteen) aboard the Glen Huntly. The ones I have stated are the ones that seem to be the most accurate and are those that are written into the N.S.W. shipping records.

oil on canvas

23cmW x 31cmH

For your chance to win this painting and a set of watercolour paints you will need to participate in the Glen Huntly Village Treasure Hunt open from March 1 - March 15th. Details to follow.