The SALA Fesitival is a festival celebrating the living artist of South Australia. In August, while visiting family in Glenelg, South Australia, I went for a walk around the Glenelg, Mosley Square. While walking around Mosely Square I saw shipping containers being used to exhibit various artists work. It was part of an exhibition of the SALA Festival.
So, I decided to take advantage of my weekend away and see a few of the exhibitions that were on offer in the Glenelg and Adelaide area. Saturday we wandered around the Glenelg, SA SALA festival exhibitions.
Our first stop was to the old Glenelg Fire Station. The exhibition there was featuring the work of An impressionist and contemporary exhibition by SA artist Neil Sheppard. Based on Kangaroo Island, Neil’s work is displayed in the old Glenelg Fire Station. I was most impressed by Niel’s use of black as a base colour to many of his pieces. This gave the base colour of the shade for Neil’s landscape paintings. It made the images pop with colour and details.
| Niel Sheppard’s Hudson Bay, SALA Festival 2014 |
| Old Glenelg Fire Station |
Moseley Square, Glenelg, MSquare had a mixture of canvas pieces featuring a representation of shells using mixed media, still life, and life drawings. The featured artists that day were part of The Changing Canvas group that offer workshops, classes, commission work and much more. I think I will be to incorporating a workshop or class at The Changing Canvas into my next trip to Glenelg.
| The Changin Canvas at SALA 2014 |
Our next stop was to visit the Discovery Centre on Moseley Square, Glenelg. I must admit I have never been in the Discovery Centre, despite going to Glenelg nearly every year and having family living in Glenelg. Having lived in South Australia for many years, I never thought of the Discovery Centre as more than just an information centre for tourists. How wrong I was.
The discovery centre has a mini museum on the discovery and settlement of Glenelg. For the SALA Festival, the Discovery Centre had an are exhibition on in the lobby area. It was there that I and saw Sylvia Preston’s water colour’s. Sylvia lives in the Glenelg area and is a resident in the same retirement complex as my father-in-law. It goes to show that you never lose your desire to create and I hope in my retirement I am still able to create works of art.
Studio 86 on Broadway had some really beautiful mixed media canvases. One canvas is a clown montogue of paper and other media to form the clown’s neck fill and hat decoration. The artist’s work showed how familiar she was with many media, ink, acrylic, paper and other mediums to create some really beautiful works of art.
The highlight of my tour of the SALA events was a guided guided walk through the Botanical Garden in Adelaide. The walk took us on a tour of all the beautiful plants that were the inspiration of several botanical artists and their work. The photos below do not do the work justice. I plan to work through my notes for that day and write another blog post on botanical artists. Stay tuned….
I am planning to get to the next SALA Festival in 2015. There were so many open studios and exhibitions.
Does your state or city have a special festival to celebrate living artists?
Happy Blogging,
Tracy @ HandmadeWarratahstree
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