Memoir

A very long party

Item: Unstill Life
Author: Vivien Gaston

by Vivien Gaston •

May 2008, no. 301

Unstill Life: Art, politics and living with Clifton Pugh by Judith Pugh

Allen & Unwin, $32.95 pb, 360 pp

Self-Portrait of the Artist’s Wife by Irena Sibley

Lytlewode Press, $60 hb, 306 pp

Memoir

A very long party

by Vivien Gaston •

May 2008, no. 301

Marry an artist? Never! So I always thought, and reading these autobiographies does nothing to change my prejudice. Married to artists, both Judith Pugh and Irena Sibley spend a good deal of their time cooking and, even more, socialising. Not that they mind. Judith declares that ‘cooking was my deep pleasure’, essential to the story of her life with Clifton (‘Clif’) Pugh. Irena concedes facetiously, ‘it’s too hard painting pictures. It is easier to bake cakes.’ The importance of food is apparent in the chapter titles. Eleven of Sibley’s chapters refer to food, while all of Pugh’s have subheadings that, typically, jumble up evocative ingredients.

Vivien Gaston

Vivien Gaston is an art historian, curator, and writer. She has published on subjects ranging from sixteenth-century Italian painting to eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century British and Australian portraits. She has curated two major exhibitions The Naked Face: self-portraits (National Gallery of Victoria, 2011) and Controversy: the power of art (Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, 2012). A third exhibition, Sublime Sea: rapture and reality, is forthcoming in 2019. She has been a lecturer in art history at the University of Melbourne and Monash University and is currently a Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne.