Art and Entertainment in Sydney

 

Emma Hack and I



One great thing about living in the world’s greatest city is that the Sydney offers so much every day. Last week I’ve had a super packed Tuesday and I was kept busy with art and entertainment.   After a morning of classes I caught the subway to the eastern suburbs. For those of you fellows who don’t know it, here is a small insight into Sydney’s social structure. If you live in the eastern suburbs, you are probably twice as rich as the ones who live in the southern or western suburbs and you eat your morning breakfast with a golden spoon. So why did poor Jana (who is technically only poor in money, not poor in spirit or life, since I’m living the dream here) go to the Eastern subs? Because she got to meet her current favorite artist in a Gallery! On Tuesday Emma Hack, an Adelaide based body-art artist had an opening and showed some of her latest works and since I’ve been emailing with her for a while, she invited me for a coffee. I almost felt like a little teenage girl getting to meet a popstar, but surprisingly I didn’t start screaming and crying when I saw her, so I guess I am a little more mature than Tokio Hotel fans. So we talked for a like 2 hours before she had to open her exhibition.



copy right Emma Hack

After the opening I left and went back downtown, where I meet up with some friends for dinner. Since I was way too early I walked down the main street and passed the movie theatre. And surprise, since Sydney is slightly bigger than Münster, there was a Movie Opening Night with a red carpet. It was the Pirates Movie Premiere, but Jonny Deep had better things to do, so the only “famous actor” was Geoffrey Rush, the guy who played the bad guy in the movie. But still, it satisfied my temporary need to see a famous person ;)  From there I passed the I-max and once again couldn’t believe I actually have a job there. I work a lot at the moment and I actually really enjoy working at the moment. It’s still very exciting to work at the Imax and I can’t complain. Anyway.  The night wasn’t over yet. After the dinner, all the exchange students went to a laser-tag place next to the restaurant. There we had the chance to satisfy our need for adrenaline. So we were teamed up in a blue and a red team, got some vests and a laser gun. So we were running around trying to shoot laser beams at each other. Some guys got sooo into it. So while most of the girls sucked and were just giggeling, the boys were crazy into scoring and winning. But it was really exhausting at the same time, cause you had to run and hide all the time. Overall a fun night.

  



Darling Harbour and the I-Max at night



My days in Sydney aren’t always as eventful as on the Tuesday on which I got to meet Emma Hack.  In general my days are a little more laid back and instead of meeting “stars”, playing lasertag and eating out, I cook cheap but yummy food, don’t shoot people with lasers and do art myself.

So after meeting up with Emma Hack, I felt the instant urge to do a facepainting of my own. So the next week I made two new ones. The first one I did, was at the northern Olympic pool. It was actually quite difficult to find a good spot from where to start, because this is the first painting I’ve tried twice. On my first try I chose a bad angle and my outline, which I drew on the face, was positioned so badly, that my model looked like the McDonnalds Clown Ronald McDonnald, because the arch I’d outline looked like a giant M.  So the second time, when I started over again, I had to choose my models location in front of the arched background more carefully ( since the arches in the background created this horrible McDonnalds Image;). Plus it was quite difficult to get it right without making the colors look to bright or my model Thomas appeared like an avatar.  It’s so funny that I ran into Thomas in Sydney!  Come on how small is this world? Two sport science students from Münster both in Sydney at the same time? So of course I had to paint on his face.

Then a week later I met up again with Trine from Denmark, with whom I had done a previous painting, so I knew she would be a good model. Even though our intention was to go to the Aquarium, we ended up in a different location that morning. The stupid Aquarium people told us, they would have too many school kids there that week so we should come back next week. So since the weather forecast was lying (supposingly it was gonna rain, but the sun was shining more beautifully than ever) we went to Darling Harbour Park from where we had a good view on the Skyline. So that’s were my latest painting came to life.

Besides Painting on Faces I’ve been starting to draw on my photo prints from my photography class and I’ve been painting occasionally on canvas. But since I only have so little time in Sydney left and I can’t afford big canvas anyway, I keep painting on small sized canvas.