Queen Victoria Market, football, Cathy Drummond, 2001, city buildings
Summary
Painter and printmaker Cathy Drummond has a keen eye for the everyday, as well as for the often-small joys it can bring. Since the 1980s, she has been recording the urban landscapes of Melbourne, building up in paint a social and spatial history of the town she calls home.
In her ‘Wednesday Morning at the Victoria Market’, Drummond turns on its head our expectation of Melbourne’s frenetic central produce market. She paints a calm scene of morning activity, with the work’s title reminding us that the streets surrounding the market are given back to the local community on Wednesday (and on Monday too). The market may long have been a meeting place for a very broad community of users, but the social life of this locale is more than just the transactional relationships behind filling pantry and fridge; it has a resident community for whom the public zone is an extension of the private space.
Viewed from the apex of O’Connell and Cobden Streets, Queen Victoria Market and the city behind it stretch across the canvas to form the horizon line. The thrusting wedge of red-brick building bisecting this well-composed painting directs the viewer’s focus to the street life. In the painting’s left-hand pane, three youths throw a football in the morning sun; on the right, a suited couple with briefcases in hand cross a shady Cobden Street, presumably on their way to work. In this very detailed acrylic painting, Drummond gives us a snapshot of everyday life in inner Melbourne, circa 2001.
