the art show

...so we - my husband, the kid, and a couple of friends - wandered along to the Affordable Art Fair on Saturday afternoon. There was an extraordinary photographer, some on-the-verge-of-kitsch pieces made with swirling crystalline effects in coloured perspex "canvases" that I don't have a site for, and a surprising number of sketches and paintings of fanciful and/or hybrid animals.

but the photograph I actually bought was of the Esplanade Hotel. the fact that the photograph - about 60 by 45 centimetres - really was affordable at $150 instead of $1500 or $15,000 - helped. (I can't find the image online: the photographer is here.) I liked its combination of washed out buildings and hyper-coloured sky, I guess. but most of all, I liked it because it was the Esplanade Hotel on a sunny afternoon, packed with happy drinking Melbourne people; because it was yet another photo of possibly Melbourne's most photographed hotel; because it wasn't a photo from the days of parasols and horsedrawn carriages, but from my time, the time of branded market umbrellas and blokes in singlets milling around the crowded tables. I bought it because it was a photography of something I knew to be real. In the days when I worked on the local paper down there, I must have covered two or three "battles for the Espy", from dodgy licensees to attempts to gut the building. the locals always rallied and the Espy always won.

in the upper right corner, the massive apartment block that sits behind the Espy is just visible, and strangely, I like that too, because it forms a kind of modern background that adds a layer to the scene, that underlines the survival of the Espy; it dates the scene to now, and yet the big white Victorian Esplanade Hotel yields nothing. it just sits there, looking out across the bay in a pleasant haze of beer and distant music.