On a recent outing to Melbourne, attempting to imbibe some culture, spend some time with my teenage daughter and leave a lasting cultural impression on her malleable mind, we spent some time wandering around the NGV.

Here below is a shot of Ebs, who is both much hipper and happier than her melancholic mother. I have to post this photo to remind myself and my dear readers that somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue and girls wearing funky sherpa beanies smile radiantly at the camera while gaily skipping school to wander the streets of Melbourne.

Whilst wandering around the art gallery, I found myself wondering - what makes art, art? An uncultured question I know, typically only asked by cultural pagans like myself. In any case, I asked myself - Why was I alternatively bored and captivated by different pieces? Why was I quite unimpressed by Shearing of the Rams, when it is obviously an Australian classic, and deeply moved by Munch's Kvinnen? Here are a few of the works which spoke to me - a cultural neanderthal clomping her way around one of Australia's finest cultural establishments. My memoir begins with the Roberts painting - a moment of anticlimax, of recognising and having to accept my complete unappreciation of obvious artistic genius. And then the slow dawning and realisation that not all art is there to be liked, and not all art needs to be pretty. No duh.

Tom Roberts - Shearing the Rams 1890

So here I was, standing in front of Roberts. No longer could I pretend to tour the gallery as a cultural elite. Here was the moment of reckoning...I stood in front of the impressive work and...yawned. A furtive glance around, and I breathed a sigh of relief - no witnesses to my embarrassing faux pas. A moment of intense self-doubt, than my natural self-confidence (I am a Leo, hear me roar) reasserted itself. And I realised it was not that the painting was unimpressive, you can almost touch the rippling forearm of the shearer and feel the sweat running down his brow, it was rather that the whole work should really have been called - An ode to virility (where are the damn sheep? Rams???) The whole scene made me want to do my best Tim the Toolman Taylor grunt.

Much more emotionally and visually pleasing and lovely was Arthur Loureiro, born in Portugal, who worked in Australia and was a contemporary of Roberts. His style, even his Australian landscapes, are less grunt and more glamour. So these two works are very nice. I moved on quickly, harbouring a suspicion of all things 'nice', funky sherpa beanies being the one exception.

Arthur Loureiro - The Spirit of the New Southern Cross

Arthur Loureiro - The Spirit of the New Moon

James Gleeson - The Siamese Moon 1952

This is more like it! James Gleeson is one of Australia's foremost surrealist artists whose themes apparently 'delve into the subconscious using literary, mythological or religious subject matter. He was particularly interested in Jung's archetypes of the collective unconscious.' Being something of a fan of Jung, I said to myself (somwhat relieved) 'Aha. You are not a cultural neanderthal after all. Here is redemption' - at last I could feel something beyond 'oh that's technically proficient' and 'oh, isn't that pretty?'. That is to say, I had feelings about an artwork, and didn't have to make them up. What I saw 'spoke to me' and I didn't have to consult the information kindly supplied by the gallery to inform me why I should be impressed. I was impressed by the painting (quite literally, it pressed itself upon me) and the gallery supplied information was a validation that here somebody has visualised and captured the images, thoughts and ideas that occasionally flit around my mind but have so far succesfully evading capture. What a gift to be able to give birth to visions in this way.

Sally Smart - Femmage Frieze

This was in the Stick It exhibition, celebrating collage in Australian Art.

I liked this piece because there is something wonderfully 'Kafkaesque' about the women, and I'm not surprised to find Sally Smart, a contemporary Australian artist, is interested in 'the heimlich and the unheimlich, the canny and the uncanny, houses and blots, furniture and body parts, anamorphic shapes and shadows, psychological spaces as both internal and historical.' Ah, a woman after my own heart. I mean, how good does this sound?

'Sally Smart has long been interested in the unstable, the illusory and the uncanny. As opposed to certainty or perfectibility, her interest is in the realms of shadows, symptoms, dreams, mutations, subconscious memories and spooks that haunt the mind’s equilibrium. This is revealed in fantastic images that trigger associations and partial recollections of things encountered in the course of life’s journey: entrancing phantoms from tales told to us in childhood (in which, perhaps, inanimate objects became magically alive); -plays; the shadows of trees silhouetted on moonlit nights; medical diagrams or X-rays of the body; moths swooping in towards the light.'

Danila Vassilieff - Drowned sisters - 1949

Edvard Munch - Kvinnen

This Munch drawing was in the Love, Loss and Intimacy exhibition, currently showing at the NGV. What I immediately liked about the drawing is the contrasts.

The saintly virgin is light and ethereal. Pure innocence, she stands on the cusp of life. The earthy whore, the centre of the picture, unites within her the virgin and the crone, darkness and light, death and life. This is Eve, the embodiment of life. And yet, as a whore she is the expression of men's fantasies. The crone to the left has lost both her sexual potential (the unfurled bud of the virgin) and its realisation (the flowering whore). She begins to silently recede into darkness and into death (menopause I presume, and the dying rose?) I don't remember the helpful information kindly supplied by the gallery, but I do remember the reference to the prostitute. To me, the entire piece echoes Simone de Beauvoir's woman as 'the Other', as the second sex or she who is without her own identity. I recently read Clarissa Pinkola Estes book - Women who run with the wolves. In her classic work she sets out to rehabilitate distortions of male fantasies. She celebrates the sexuality of woman as woman and as part of the natural cycle from immaturity (the virgin) to maturity (the crone), where each stage of a woman's life is honoured.

In retrospect, the drawing makes me both angry and wistful. I am angry that my identity should be so determined by the One, that my celebration of life should silently recede into darkness, that who I am should be replaced in future by the symbols that appeal to male virility - the virgin and the whore. My destiny is that of the crone, and I am angry I will one day be silenced when I have finally found my voice. I am wistful because already I have lost the innocent virgin, the ingenue - beautiful, gentle, sweet and naive. I am already weathered by the inevitable scars of my biological function - pregancy, childbirth, sleepless nights, death and loss - and its imprint on my psycic spirit. And though I stand tall and strong, and possess the confidence of the earthy woman in my body and spirit, the creeping shadow of the crone comes nearer. I can no longer avert my eyes as easily as the virgin. The virgin will be immortalised. The whore has a definite use by date.

Below is the painting on the theme experimented with in the drawing. This painting is exhibited in Norway, the birthplace of Munch. More fully developed here are the contrasts, with the addition of a fourth figure turning away from the sea (where the virgin waits expectantly for her ship to arrive?) into the obscurity and darkness of the wild forest. I like to think she will be reborn amongst the damp leaves that blanket the ground, she will rest on the moss that cushions the boulders and logs, she will wander beneath the limbs reaching to the sky, sheltering those beneath from the all seeing eye of the One. I hope she is reborn among those who are Women, who are Other and find themselves at last, away from the sea and the tide bearing the One for which they have waited and whom they have served their entire life. Away in the darkness, sheltered in the earth, shedding their old skin, their old cares and leaving behind both the One and the Other. Perhaps then, the Whore is beginning to embrace the forest, and this too is to be celebrated.

Munch - The Three Stages of Woman (Sphinx) 1894

Edvard Munch is most famous for The Scream. Born in 1863, he was a pioneer of the Expressionist movement. For this alone, I like him! But it gets better. Deeply affected by the early deaths of his mother and eldest sister, his own sickliness, and his father's religious inclinations, he found expression to the restless soul-searching in his art. A critic and contemporary of his time wrote - 'With ruthless contempt for form, clarity, elegance, wholeness, and realism, he paints with intuitive strength of talent the most subtle visions of the soul.' Forget pretty landscapes, the Australians - Roberts and Loureiro. Or (dare I say it) the delightful scenes of Monet. Be gone realists, naturalists and even impressionists. Enter the expressionist who gives form, shape and colour to the inner life and psyche of modern men and women. Munch's art works around the themes of existential dread, anxiety, loneliness, and the complex emotions of human sexuality that confront us in life. Here are some fabulous Munch quotes.

"We want more than a mere photograph of nature. We do not want to paint pretty pictures to be hung on drawing-room walls. We want to create,or at least lay the foundations of, an art that gives something to humanity. An art that arrests and engages. An art created of one's innermost heart."

"I began as an Impressionist but it was limited and I had to find another way of expressing the emotional turmoil....I was searching for Expression."

"Disease and madness and death were the black angels standing over my cradle."

Such a melancholy ending cheers me no end.