Ambling along upper Moorabool Street

from w
The weather was a bit more tolerable this morning so I went into town to see the photographs at the Wintergarten Cafe and the paintings upstairs - kind of abstracts but mainly interesting blobs. The black and white photos were from a calendar made by the women of the Harmony Choir, nude but very modest, as the curves were almost hidden by rocks and trees in the landscape. There were lots of older women there and I met one of the U3A writers I once knew and we recalled the time when we were students together with Avis Hart, a brilliant teacher of creative writing in the year 2000. She is into photography these days and we talked about Picasa and such like.On the way back to the bus I ambling along Moorabool Street browsing in the lovely shops there such as Fyans Cottage and Little India. I ignored three golf shops but bought picture frames at a very neat Vinnies Op Shop. Fyans Cottage has lovely Edwardian kind of pictures, cards, pottery, etc. that decorative art that started with Toulouse Lautrec much earlier. Examples here are from a diary with pictures by Erte and Rachel Bishop's Moorcroft Peacock.
. So who on earth is Erte? Apparently he was a Russian artist and he says, "Not Only do I do what I want to do, but I do my work in my own way and never have been influenced by another artist. The sole influences on my art, through the course of my entire career, were the Persian and Indian Miniatures and Greek vases I saw in my childhood at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (Now Leningrad). I think that these influences have stayed with me to this day, although they were assimilated long ago." (Excerpt "At Ninety") There's a website about Erte.