Do you know how fortunate you are, Tasmania?

For such a tiny island there is a rich blessing of creativity ... art, artists, photographers, ceramicists, printmakers etc, etc.

Pliny must direct you to a couple of exhibitions thoroughly worthy of your wonder.

First, don’t miss Rodney Pople, just two weeks ago the subject of picketing by the religious in Sydney.

Pople is confronting.

At Despard you gaze down what could be the centre isle of a mini cathedral to confront a triptych ... there is a great white pointer in the centre panel and a naked ecstatic woman on an alter mirrored on either side.

Picture of Rodney Pople and triptych, from HERE

What to make of this?

Felicity Fenner in notes to Pople’s Altered soothes the sensibilities and adds a little historical perspective:

“Images of sexually explicit acts supermimposed onto traditional renaissance Church alterpieces may seem provocative, even sacriligious ... Yet they are not so far-fetched: 16th century paintings were commonly commissioned for their erotic as much as religious content, such as Titian’s paintings of Venus commissioned by the Duke of Urbino.

Pople reinterprets the role of painting ... combining photography and oil paint. “imagery of 16th century Western culture imbued with seemingly dissonant references to aspects of today’s world. Each work has its origin in a photograph, taken by Pople, of the interior of a museum or church, on which modern imagery is transposed…. most of the paintings are based on research undertaken in Venice, Italy, last year”.

Of the triptych and the Great White, Fenner says: The works’ delicate balance between chaos and control is also the result of the artit’s abiding curiosity about animals and their place in the world ... the shark is steering a new course of survival, en environmental refugee perhaps from rising sea levels ...”

Meanwhile elsewhere, Dick Bett’s Barbie Kjar Revisited has been so popular it’s on again. Another Afternoon with printmaker Kjar is on tomorrow afternoon at Betts’ North Hobart gallery. Dick’s also got Ricky Maynard until Nov 30.

But wait there’s more ...

Don’t miss “TASMANIA”, a collaborative photo exhibition at the Long Gallery by Rob Blakers, Simon Olding, Wolfgang Glowacki and Hillary Younger. The exhibition runs for the first 12 days of December.

And, upcoming at Goulburn Gallery is an artist Pliny reckons is underrated… Jonathan Barnard does Wellingtonia, ethereal beauty and the wild.

Ed: All the exhibitions, and more are listed in Tasmanian Times’ What’s On listings: HERE. Most are from down South. What’s happening up Norf?