Barnaby Smith

Sep 29, 2024 | australianbookreview.com.au | Barnaby Smith |Arts Highlights

The Critic begins with a voice-over in Ian McKellen’s gravelly yet sonorous tones. After defining the term ‘critic’ (‘judge’, according to its Latin and Greek etymology), he declares, ‘The drama critic is feared and reviled for the judgement he must bring, but the truth is imperative, the critic must be cold and perfectly alone. Only the greats are remembered.’ This grandiose statement indicates just how seriously McKellen’s character, theatre critic Jimmy Erskine, takes his craft.

Aug 25, 2024 | australianbookreview.com.au | Barnaby Smith |Arts Highlights

Among the pivotal dates in the life of the Beatles, 27 August 1967 is one of the most significant. That’s when the band’s manager Brian Epstein died, aged thirty-two, in his London flat, the result of an accidental overdose of barbiturates and alcohol. His death precipitated the fracturing and ultimate fragmentation of the group. The financial disarray that dogged them at the time of their split in 1970 was something that Epstein would certainly have prevented.

Aug 13, 2024 | artguide.com.au | Barnaby Smith

In dedicating itself to landscape in Australian art, The Land is Us: Stories, Place & Connection takes on a broad remit. But it’s precisely that broadness—alongside an expansive interpretation of what landscape art is—that this exhibition celebrates.

Aug 6, 2024 | artguide.com.au | Barnaby Smith

“Much of the work that’s made in the Territory is very inspired by place, culture, community and landscape,” says Darwin Festival director Kate Fell. She is speaking in relation to Kathryn Dwyer’s exhibition, Colour Conference, at the city’s Tactile Arts gallery—paintings defined by their colourful detail and exuberant depictions of the Northern Territory environment.

May 23, 2024 | artguide.com.au | Barnaby Smith

Matilda Davis’s The White Man’s Web emerged out of the Badjala/Batjala artist’s memories of environmental destruction in the vicinity of her coastal home during childhood and adolescence. “I first thought about making this work as a teenager after seeing discarded crab pots with juvenile milbi [turtles] and shovelnose rays stuck in them,” says Davis.