Unfortunately they have lost a few sponsors along the way… but that sort of thing happens and despite everything, it is a fantastic opportunity for the Australian societies to band together and demonstrate their skills. (Click images in this article to see a larger image.)

The art of miniaturization is a very ancient art.

The Persian and Indian miniatures being among the most exquisite. Painters in Japan, China, Arabia, Russia, Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, England and Europe also developed the skill generally.
Miniatures in Europe were used as identification of an individual… for example; male or female persons desiring to marry would be sent a miniature of the other person for their perusal, or to carry with them as a reminder of their loved one. It had to be small enough to carry in a person’s hand, pocket or bag. The scribes had to add a likeness of their employer to a page in a book or an important document relating to that person.
It had to be perfectly balanced in colour and detail. It was to be multilayered in technique so as to reflect light, within the boundary of the frame.
It is an enchanting form of art as demanding in its technique, as in its seductive powers. During the reign of Henry VII in England it became fashionable to wear a miniature portrait. Many of which were painted on ivory, or vellum.
To day there are many different techniques employed… A particularly exciting innovation being miniature books… which again was introduced to the Australian miniature art awards by Philippa… the members became very enthusiastic about that section of the awards exhibition.
164 works went on display at the Ewart Gallery in Willoughby, on Sydney’s North Shore, which demonstrates that there is still enthusiasm for keeping alive this ancient art form.

In my mind there is only one thing which mars this wonderful exhibition and that is that the same people year in and year out seem to win the awards… which is not allowing or encouraging young blood to enter the show… I believe that, like the Archibald, Wynn and the Sullmann… the artist should only be able to win three times… which is a an achievement in itself, and then hung in an honoury position. After that a wall of fame could be set up for those artists clever enough to win three times.
A.S.M.A.’s definition of a miniature is that a work may not exceed100sq cms, (10cmsx10cms), or any variation under this size. The 1/6th scale applies to the size of the object or person in nature. This has not been adopted by this society, but the spirit of miniaturization must be maintained.
The first official meeting of A.S.M.A. was held in 1985 and has been kept going by a band of enthusiastic volunteers to this day.

Click to see larger image

“Why?” you might ask. Because he feels like it!

Jim has been most impressed by the diverse approach that individual students have used to paint, in the renaissance style, a portrait of their lovely model Rebecca.
He is also impressed at the generosity of sharing that has developed among the students; after all not one of these people had ever met before!
Jim feels very privileged to have brought some of the students to the threshold of their own creativity, and he finds life very exciting when he unearths the unexpected talent in people who would never have thought that they could have even a vague success painting a portrait…
This group includes Ophelia Rechlin, a former fashion  designer. Jenny Porcellini a young mum, and very keen student. Cheryl Laizens. Glenis Gray, an emerging artist, seriously working at developing her skills. Kath Nash, a gardening guru. Brad Drew, a Mapleton based architect. Michael Simpson a local G.P. Musician and sketcher, Fran Davies, and Philippa Stewart-Hall, professional artist…
and of course, Jim being very helpful, as usual.
Philippa Stewart-Hall 2008

“Glimpses of my life in New Zealand”

My grandmother Tina was a tiny Scottish woman…. about 4′11″ and she was
married to my grandfather Tommy Fraser, who, might I add stood 6′6″… a very interesting match…especially as they managed to have three children: Alec, Jean, and Daphne… the two girls were 6′ and Alec was 6′6″….
The lady next door was teaching me the piano on a piece of paper… which
had a printed key board on it…I was all of 4 or 5 years of age…
One day my grandmother asked my grandfather to please go down the road
and buy a loaf of bread… he disappeared for hours and Gran was becoming
more and more cranky. The streets of Christchurch are very very flat, and after a long period, grandpa, was seen wheeling a piano down the street.
When asked about the loaf of bread he answered with out any remorse…
“Oh, I forgot. Anyway. Hellhound, (my nickname), can now learn the piano
properly.
Needless to say all hell broke loose.
When I was sent down the road for a loaf of bread… I was worse… because
the bread was freshly cooked and square and wrapped in tissue paper. I would open it up where it was joined together… eat the contents and put it back together (half empty), wrap it back up in the tissue paper, hand it to my
grandmother and run like mad.
Poor old Gran…she had such a lot of problems just getting a loaf of bread.

“Little Glimpses….”

The Avon is a particularly beautiful river in Christchurch. I remember my
father rowing us up the river, which was as clear as a bell, and had gorgeous
trees lining the banks. The day sparkled. Needless to say I made one
attempt to fall in…but to no avail.
The Salvation Army band would march around the streets and I loved them
because they gave you these tiny pretty little pictures, which had nice sayings
on them. I must have got a crush on the captain because to my mother’s
horror I brought him home for dinner.
I remember having to visit my mother in hospital and wondering what the heck
was wrong with her and what the fuss was all about…It turned out that it was
her big toe. My gosh!!! I would have hated it to be more serious. St Margaret’s was a lovely school and I remember having to take elocution
lessons because my mother decided that she wanted me to speak “proper-like”. Now as you can see I was a little tub of a child with long plaits.
At the end of the year the class had to get up on stage… each one dressed in black (which I might add slimmed me down… a bit)….
Each child represented a letter from the word, ELOCUTION.
Well the kids stepped forward individually and all said their line beautifully
e.g.” I am the E” and dutifully would step back into line…Then it was my
turn…this little, plaited, tub all dressed in black stepped up and said….
“And I am the full stop.”
Needless to say that brought the house down with both my parents laughing
hysterically. It was one of the worst moments of my life.
However to day…I can see the funny side.
My childhood was quite wonderful… those days were much safer and as long
as I reported in to my grandma after school… I could roam free until six
o’clock. Grandma was now in business and running a boarding house.
Her residents were Mormons, a wonderful people. They were very kind and
taught me how to walk on tall stilts and how to fly kites…. and if I was very
lucky I would get a ride on their motorbikes. Many years later, in America the
Mormons were very kind again…. they are unutterably delightful and so caring.
But that’s a tale for another time.
I hated the dentist…as most people do…but this one was  particularly
nasty…I loathed him…he hurt….one day he hurt too much …so I bit him…..
W…E…L…L!!!  He deserved it!!!!…I should have bitten him harder!!!
I cannot remember who was with me…but we were in this huge department
store…when we all smelt smoke…. everyone ran and went out onto the
street…. there were firemen and hoses and police everywhere…it was very
exciting…I was holding this person’s hand…and watching in awe as the
flames took over…. I believe that I was removed from the scene …much to
my disappointment…. it was all so spectacular. The building was totally
destroyed.
After we arrived home we were all sitting around the kitchen table
when a shout of horror went up….”Who Farted????”
“The dog ” was the reply.
“Crikey!” The darn dog wasn’t even in the room.
My mother was and is a very clever woman…. she decided…because my
Father was still at sea, that she would start manufacturing clothing for the tall
woman. She started a very famous business called “Stewart Gowns”. Within a very short space of time she had about 20 girls working for her. My father
did not renew his commission and retired from the sea to join her in this very
successful business venture. He did a couple of things which have stuck in my
memory…by comedy of errors and communication with the salesman he
ordered what he thought would be one gross of toilet rolls…apparently it
turned out to be a gross gross from what I hear they were finding every
excuse to give the toilet rolls away.
Now the girls who worked in the factory were young and complaints were
starting to come in, from their parents, about their daughters learning
swearing at work. Naturally, my father being ex navy was the culprit and so
my mother demanded that he lecture the girls.
So…o…o…he dutifully lined all the girls up one morning and gave them a
wonderful lecture…
However his final statement blew all the good he had done into the water…
“And if I hear any one of you girls swearing ever again I will bloody well have
to…”
Daddy was a great debater, a highly intelligent man, who decided that he was
going to run for politics…however he went to the Ashburton shop, and had a
couple of drinks with the manager…. prior to a big political debate, upon which
rested his political career…however he argued brilliantly…
FOR the opposition.
And that, said Jack, was that.

What a great opening it was. Despite the pouring rain people came from everywhere and were so supportive.

Food and wine was in abundance as were the viewing audience…
who expressed enormous interest in the concept and also a desire to learn more about a very difficult subject in quantum physics.

The exhibitors Helga Nehkorn, Suzanne Chisholm, Pam Condor, Philippa Stewart-Hall, Lindley Hart, Tracy Lewis and Dianne Scott decided some months ago to exhibit together…none of them knew Philippa from a bar of soap as she and her husband Andy had only arrived in Queensland to live permanently 16 months ago.

So in a sense she was the wildcard…however Philippa is used to that…. (Gets her into quite a bit of strife…from which she just manages to extricate herself before the mob annihilation process).

However despite the huge mix of media and talent, the exhibition was one they could all be proud of.

Helga’s colourful works were a beautiful interlacing of patterns, which indicated the randomness of chaos.

Suzanne’s lovely gentle drawings of the agapantha demonstrated that fractals exist in everything.
Pam Condors very beautiful silk hangings had a delicacy and randomness that also had a concealed heart inside the work.

Philippa Stewart-Hall chose a more academic approach to the subject matter and used acrylics and mixed media to answer the challenge of fractals and the patterns of chaos. The first work demonstrates the geometric academe prior to the discovery by Benoit Mandlebrot of a very simple equation
Z->Z ^ + C.

This simple equation threw the scientific world into a frenzy of embarrassment; because it could now be demonstrated that the universe and galaxies and life on this planet is not as ordered as previously thought.

Lindley Hart’s work was wonderfully chaotic …yet ordered at the same time. It has wonderful movement and suggestions of continual change.

Tracy Lewis’ sculptures were incredible in their sophisticated use of her materials and subtle use of colours and repetitive shapes. These are very powerful works indeed.

Dianne Scott had a multiple of photographic images transferred onto canvas…. the cropping of the
photographs was exceedingly well done from Dianne’s exploratory photographs.
The whole exhibition was very professional and the wonderful use of colour, and the way all the works blended so well together was a tribute to the seven artists, who now are calling themselves “The Chaotics”.

They intend to exhibit together as a group again.

Exhibition at The David Linton Gallery finished 30th June 2008
Enquiries (07) 5429 6831

Z - > Z ^2+ C…
Who would have thought that with the discovery of the computer came this simple equation, which threw conventional science off its perch…
No longer could a universe be described by a detailed set of laws.

The belief in the inevitable end of time in complete entropy and the second law of thermodynamics where everything tends to break down are now being questioned. The cosmic clock image of establishment science first began to crumble at the turn of 20th century when discoveries were bringing to light that causal laws didn’t ring true and that the behaviour of the atom and the individual electron could not be predicted.

Einstein one of the worlds most brilliant scientists did not believe that God played dice with the universe… that we are not living in the midst of a game.
However by the 1980’s, a young, brilliant, and eclectic mathematician, Benoit Mandlebrot purported that chaos lurked behind all order. Thus the chaos theory was born.
The world is NOT a giant clock where everything is predictable. Most of the world works in jumps in a non-linear fashion that cannot be exactly predicted and out of chaos a higher order appears. This order comes out of spontaneity and unpredictability…. not just a one time event at the beginning but an on going process.
Over time all systems…from molecules, to life, to galactic clusters are continually creating new organizations and patterns out of the featureless and chaotic. To further evolution unpredictable relationships can occur.
As I said before the world is not a clock. It is a game …a game of chance and choice demonstrating unpredictability and giving infinite room for creativity within general perameters.
To Quote Mandlebrot in his book…”The Fractal Geometry of Nature” 1983…
“Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, bark is not smooth and lightening does not travel in a straight line.”We live in the 4th dimension… Time.

This fourth dimension includes an infinite set of fractional dimensions which lie between the zero and the first dimension, The first and the second dimension and the second and third dimension. The fourth dimension includes the fractional dimensions, which lie between the first three.

Fractal is a word based on the Latin word fractus, and as Mandlebrot proved nature uses the fractal dimensions to create the complex and irregular forms of the real world of the 4th dimension.

It has been stated that our natural consciousness is inherently fractal.
“Z -> Z ^ 2 + C”…
It is this formula which has embarrassed mathematicians by virtue of its ridiculous simplicity. No longer did Euclidean geometry reign supreme…. because a bright young mathematician thought out side the square.
The arrow symbol-> means Itineration. Itineration is the feedback process where the end result of the last calculation becomes the beginning constant of the next.
In other words the result of z +c becomes the z in the next repetition
So if say Z=2 and C=3, the result of the first iteration would be 7(2 +3). Then the next time Z=7, and C remains the same,3. So the result is 52(7 +3…
And so the process continues.
Like life it is a dynamic equation
And as Mandlebrot points out this idea of “recursive similarity” was originally developed by the philosopher Leibniz, and popularized by the writer Jonathan Swift in 1733 with the following verse:
“So, Nat’ralists observe, a flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller fleas to bit ‘em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.”This same verse was followed in 1922 by Lewis Richardson, a mathematician studying weather predictions, who coined the quote concerning “turbulence”, the chaotic condition of liquids and gases.
“Big whorls have little whorls,
Which feed on their velocity;
And little whorls have lesser whorls,
And so on to viscosity”
The ideas of self-similarity and scaling embodied in these verses are critical to understanding the Laws of Chaos. Wherever we look in nature we find fractals with self-similarity over scales. It is in every snowflake, every bolt of lightening, every tree, and every branch. It is in our blood with its veins, in our Galaxies with their clusters; it’s even in broccoli.”

Researched and written by
Philippa Stewart-Hall
With quotes from Benoit B. Manlebrot’s book
“The Fractal Geometry of Nature”
New York: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1982
ISBN 0-387-96608-0

They were particularly enthusiastic about the Australian artists’ works and the exhibition is due to travel further into other galleries around South Korea.

It is wonderful that such an exchange can take place between the two countries.
Philippa Stewart-Hall Artwork… “The Gates of Dreaming”

As an International award-winning artist, Philippa asks you to share with her one of her creative mixed media artistic explorations.

Essentially a metaphysical surrealist, Philippa has exhibited continually for the last 35 years.

Included among these exhibitions are twelve solo exhibitions, three of which were at the Holdsworth Galleries in Sydney Australia.

The works range in size from a 10-cent piece to 25 feet, and use music, poetry, Haiku, nature, & natural forms, as well as scientific theories for inspiration.

I dearly wished to study art but because I went to a selective school, North Sydney Girls in Sydney where the only avenue for creativity were the biological drawings which I did for my biology studies. However art or becoming an artist was considered only a hobby and my parents despaired when I demonstrated that I did not want to go to university…after all it was only a place for finding a husband…that’s if you couldn’t make up your mind what you wanted to do…women were still expected to be, if they worked, secretaries, or something subservient in an office….

I wanted to study architecture …but was informed while at school, don’t hold any great expectations you will just end up as a draughtsman in someone’s office… so having taken that on board I decided that school and uni were a non event.

I applied to East Sydney Tech for a visual arts course and got in…but my parents would not support that idea…so they being at a loss…. sent me to Miss Hale’s to learn shorthand and typing…YUK!!!!!

As well I was sent to a deportment school…. I believe my mother thought that would most certainly help me find a husband…little did she know…. poor woman…within 6 weeks I was on a catwalk…Nervous as hell and shaking like a leaf…

I started my modeling career working for Curzons in Sydney. I didn’t intend to become a fashion model. It just eventuated.

Before long I was modeling for Farmers (who became Myers) on a regular basis and being photographed by such photographers as Laurie le Gay, Helmet Newton, & Ray Leighton. These photographs were for such companies as Woolworths, Rothmans cigarettes, Dri-Glo towels, Elizabeth French hairdressing, Berkeleys furs, Farmers dept store, Coty makeup, Franke Stuart and co bridal gowns…I was the Starlet girl for Coles makeup range and I was one of the models for the big David Jones wool parades.

I made a lot of TV commercials including one for Silverkrin hair shampoo, which won an award…. Stuyvesant cigarettes, as well as Kool cigarettes.

I acted in bit parts in channel 2 live plays and also was an extra in Whiplash and The Sundowners…. I was a better model…acting was not for me I suffered too much from stage fright.

was on the front cover of Wheels magazine, and twice on the front cover of the Woman’s Weekly as well as the weekly times.

I made heaps of money and spent the lot….

I was wined and dined in some of the best restaurants in Sydney, invited to many a ball at the Trocadero, went to fabulous live shows, had a wonderful and carefree existence…. for about 5 years…but then I started to become a bit bored…I was in all the magazines, on TV, on big billboards at railway stations and when I went to the theatre there I was again…it became a bit too much…. I couldn’t see a road forward to anything different…So I decided to move on…which I did.

My father arrived back in Hong Kong after he had had to make a delivery into the deep south china seas and discovered my mother at a dance with one of these suitors…he was furious…so he and the German fellow got into a fight and the opposition ended up knocked out up against the powder room door.
My father then marched up to my mother and said…

“Well if you are going to marry any one then you may as well marry me!!!”
and that was the marriage proposal…
A typhoon hit Hong Kong the day before they got married and there wasn’t a flower in the place…. so the bouquet had to be wired together out of petals…. but it was a wonderful day…so I am told!!!
Here I come…!!!
I was made in the bridal suite of the Raffles hotel in Singapore …where my father kept my mother for about a year…
Things were hotting up, the Japanese were in to China and Hong Kong…people were on the run all over the world and my mother was evacuated out of Singapore, (pregnant), only to arrive in a country where she didn’t understand a word of the Australian lingo…at first she hated it here…. now she adores it…..!!!
My father joined up with Royal Australian Navy as a lieutenant commander and there’s a bit of history missing here for me…
I was born just after the bombing of Pearl Harbour…. my father was home on compassionate leave…(I wonder how compassionate he thought it was after I was born). So he missed out on the bombing where our ships went down.

What I do know is that the Japanese had headed for Darwin and had arrived in Sydney Harbour…people were on the run and my family moved to Newcastle…you could not rent out a house for love nor money on Sydney Harbour at that time.
My father was sent on secret missions to New Guinea taking in Aussie commandos and hoping to pick them up after they had had achieved their objective (very few came back).

My family in the meantime had decided to get out of Australia and go to New Zealand…. which they all did…. grandma, grandpa, my great aunt Daphne and my great Uncle Alex along with my mother, father and myself…and settled in Christchurch.

That is tale for another time…

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