Art and Abart

A fascinating interview with tenor Jonas Kaufmann about Lohengrin and about 'new' productions of 'old' operas. You can see w...

Vale Ralph Hotere , visionary New Zealand artist and activist who died on 24 February aged 81. His work has an uncanny knack of etching itse...

I am not very good at throwing things away as I always think there must be another use for them. Same for drawings. Perhaps I should have di...

Last Friday I saw Richard Tognetti play Brett Dean's Electric Preludes (commissioned by Jan Minchin) on his electric violin.  The violi...

How's this for fancy finger work?

Today I sorted through the boxes of materials I had accumulated while writing Blue Tulips . As I worked a tiny (about 3cm wide) circle of pa...

I recently discovered a brilliant summation of Wagner's Ring Cycle on You Tube. It's called In the Eye of the Ring.

Anthony Ernst was a good speaker when I saw him 10 years ago but he has become an exceptional speaker since then.  This weekend he spent two...

This weekend I am going to a weekend workshop called Forging Meaning out of Music Heritage, Complexity and Vision of the Ring with Dr Anton...

I just discovered the British soprano Elisabeth Meister's blog . She writes so well about the rigors of a singer's life .... delight...

A long time ago, when women were wearing clothes with large padded shoulders I bought an Escada jacket  It is 80% linen, 10%silk, 10% cotton...

14C Gosford, 15C Sydney, 15C Dunedin, 3C in Hamburg Fifteen degrees? In February? In Sydney? It is nearly nine o'clock and 15C ...

I feel like the Venetians must in October when all the tourists leave.  Suddenly after the Australia Day long weekend my town is back to nor...

Blueberry bush with heat-dried leaves (left),puddle with umbrella reflection (middle) and wet shoes(right) The leaves of the poor little...

I just came back from a talk by Chris Masters about his new book Uncommon Soldier: The Story of the Making of Today's Diggers . He is a...

Acrylic, 51 x 72 cm Nowadays, even when I don't have a painting project underway I keep an empty canvas on my easel because I have ...

  I have just published Blue Tulips , an autobiographical book about love, music and art.  Love -  music - art,  what more could you poss...

The heat has passed, the damage is done. The vege garden cooked in the record 46C heat today. The  young fresh bean plants are now dried spe...

Holy moly ... we are being cooked alive. 46C in Sydney today I was in Sydney this morning ... it was searingly hot. It reached 46C by 2...

This Sophia, painted last Saturday. Sophia is three years old (and a bit) and as you can see from the painting she has a determined streak. ...