In her Brisbane school days, Margaret Olley (1923-2011) was ‘always rushing around, quite rebellious, doing her own thing. She wasn’t particularly academic, so she wasn’t interested in any of that.’ It was at this time that encouragement from a particularly supportive art teacher, Caroline Baker, helped spark Olley’s interest in art making – a realisation […]
Marian Ellis Rowan (1848-1922) was a prolific Australian artist who painted flora and fauna. Born into a well-connected family, her husband encouraged her painting. Although she was not professionally trained, she produced artistic, botanically accurate work by using watercolour techniques with opaque paints, often without any pre-sketching. Ellis exhibited extensively Australia-wide and overseas, including North […]
Joe Frost (1974-) painted this work for the exhibition View of Maitland from the riverbank (with apologies to Jan Vermeer and View of Delft), shown at Maitland Regional Art Gallery (MRAG) in 2006. Alongside eleven other commissioned artists, Frost painted a view of Maitland on a canvas the same size as that used by the […]
A question the artistic collective AES+F ask of themselves is: despite our technological advancement, how different are we psychologically from the people who lived in antiquity? The four artists of AES+F, Tatiana Arzamasova (1955-), Lev Evzovich (1958-), Evgeny Svyatsky (1957-) and Vladimir Fridkes (1956-), explore this query through highly produced video and photographic works that […]
While he was alive, Robert Klippel (1920-2001) lived in a nest of curious items. Each of the twenty-six rooms in his house were filled with scrap metal, wood, and junk. The materials he found were sorted and placed in separate rooms so that he could live each day assembling objects out of the various shapes […]
When twice-transported English convict Mary ‘Molly’ Morgan (1760-1835) stepped off the ship to serve a colonial sentence at Newcastle in 1814, little did she know that about 170 years later she would become the central character of a musical stage play. What would she have thought of the band’s electric guitars, saxophone and drumkit (not […]
When the young Birmingham artist Arthur Henry Fullwood (1863-1930) arrived in Maitland in 1886, what were his first impressions? Having recently migrated to the colony, Fullwood was commissioned by the Picturesque Atlas Publishing Company in Sydney to travel to the Hunter Region and depict its principal town, Maitland. Among the various locations Fullwood visited in […]
Above all, Kerrie Lester (1953-2016) was a passionate and committed art-maker. During her career she created well over thirty solo exhibitions while also finding time to become a finalist in the Archibald Prize sixteen times. She became well-known for her unique style of painting which incorporated twine sewn through the canvas to create texture. Lester’s […]
It was in 1995, during an artist’s residency at Hyde Park Barracks, that Anne Ferran (1949-) began to make art about Australia’s past: ‘You can live in a country all your life and feels like nothing happened before you got here.’ From this emerged a practice of unearthing forgotten or unspoken history and using it […]
The popular Australian cartoonist Les Lumsdon (1912-1977) was born in Abermain, New South Wales, a small outlying town of Newcastle. Spanning three decades, Lumsdon documented the lives of ordinary Australians, capturing the political mood of the times in his satirical comic sketches. He created these hand-drawn cartoons for the Newcastle Morning Herald from 1946 […]
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