Gary Solomon

15 August 2019

In late May I travelled with my artist friend Ken Giblin to New York for a fortnight. We booked accommodation on East 78thStreet so that we could be close to the big art museums. Our aim for this trip was to see as much art as we could and to enjoy being in a great city.

On our first day as we walked along our street towards Central Park we stumbled across a huge exhibition of Willem de Kooning’s work- De Kooning Five Decades. The work was outstanding. The next building along was full of art galleries. As we explored we came across a Louise Nevelson exhibition. Then there was a Jean Dubuffet exhibition. We were pinching ourselves because we hadn’t even walked out of our street yet.

We spent three days at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It had a major exhibition called Epic Abstraction with a lot of the abstract expressionist work including a spectacular room full of Jackson Pollock paintings. At the Museum of Modern Art we were very excited by the beauty of the huge Claude Monet water lily paintings.

In Chelsea we saw a large exhibition of Joan Mitchell’s huge abstract paintings. They were gestural, expressive and lyrical and absolutely stunning.

There were private galleries having exhibitions on Picasso and Cubism, and Picasso and his women with a lot of the famous paintings and sculptures. There was tribal art from Africa and Oceania and Central Australian painting of great beauty.

There was also a lot of great street art to discover as we walked all over New York.

Everywhere we went we were inspired by the art and the city.

Since coming back to Melbourne in mid June I have applied myself to my painting and my sculpture.

Our trip opened my eyes to a lot of great art and made me realize that if I apply myself to my art each day then magic will unfold in all sorts of unexpected ways.