The Artist's Chronicle is a bi-monthly magazine for artists and collectors in Western Australia, providing information for and about artists in a variety of media. The magazine lists current exhibitions, associated suppliers and services to the arts in Western Australia. Articles include current events in the visual arts in Western Australia, as well as the Eastern Australian States, Europe and America with topics from painting to sculpture, printmaking and new release art books.

The Artist's Chronicle includes coverage of the visual arts in the South of the State, as well as in the capital of Perth, and is distributed around the State.

Editorial

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This issue offers a window of current exhibitions in London, the result of my recent travels there and in Italy. Unlike Australia where reports of China often concentrate on its negative aspects of pollution, the UK has been in the grip of a massive festival of Chinese culture in the lead-up to the Olympic Games. One of over 1200 events was China Design Now at the Victoria & Albert Museum, showing the stunning pace of Chinese contemporary design across graphic design, fashion and architecture in recent decades.

In Italy we visited the Accademia Gallery in Florence for a glimpse of Michelangelo's iconic marble sculpture of David, a tourist mecca, yet worthy of visiting despite the queues and heat of the Italian summer.

Back in London Tate Britain offered a sumptuous exhibition in The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, revealing a popular genre from the seventeenth century which gained momentum up to the early twentieth century as travel became easier with the advent of steam trains. While the French may have looked down upon the 'Orientalists' as repetitive and boring, the solid selection in this show reveals a rich history across subject-matter worthy of exploring.

At Tate Modern, a diverse range of contemporary art can be surveyed from stunning street art on the facade of the building, to street and studio photography by some of the world's finest photographers, to a fascinating retrospective of the work of American-born artist Cy Twombly, which also marked his eightieth birthday earlier this year by bringing together for the first time since they were painted two of Twombly's series The Four Seasons 1994-95 from the Tate Collection and the Four Seasons 1993-94 from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Closer to home South West artist Tony Davis presents his long-awaited solo exhibition at Kingfisher Gallery in West Perth, an incredible twenty-three years since his last solo in 1985.

Lyn DiCiero
Editor