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Marjolaine Leray is the creative engine behind the successes of Studio ALM and so much more.
Despite her impressive education in a plethora of schools (Forestry and Wildlife, Mechanical Engineering and Finance) and profound success as an investment banker, it was interior design and the arts that captured Marjolaine and it is interior design and the arts that remains the custodian of this creatively gifted individual.
Leray claims her distinctive style is the fortuitous result of her “self-taught” approach and late entry into the industry as it prevented her from building an ego and freed her from the status quo.
Interior design agency, Studio ALM (launched in 2007 on a Hilltop above St Tropez), embodies Marjolaine’s curious and attentive imagination. It is nestled at the top of a hill overlooking the medieval village of Ramatuelle, which is of special importance as it is where Marjolaine grew up. Marjolaine claims the rural setting is crucial to keeping herself and her unconventionally inclined team grounded.
Studio ALM has an impressive international portfolio including site locations in Thailand, London, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, USA and of course France. Projects range from houses, restaurants, hotels... in the words of Marjolaine "everything that brings life.” Studio ALM in Australia is located in Queen Street Woollara
Maurice Lang, familiarly known as Bill, was born in Fremantle in 1930. He has painted since his early youth, studied Graphic Arts at Perth Technical College and in Sydney; and has worked as a commercial artist. In 1957, Bill arrived in Paris, where he became one of the first Australians to be admitted to the Ecole des Beaux Arts (1958). He renounced his work as a graphic artist and applied himself entirely to his painting. Since then he has lived and worked between the South of France and Paris, exhibiting mainly in Europe.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
1958 Atelier, Jacqueline Robinson, Paris
1968 Galerie La Galere, Paris
1969 Galerie Claude Levin, Paris
1974 Bookshop Gallery, Ile St. Lois, Paris
1979 Galerie Chapo, Paris
1979 Galerie Regis Langloys, Paris
1980 Salon des Artistes Independants, Paris
1982 Recontres Montparnasse, Paris; Lisieux, Normandy
1985 Musee Roy Adzak
1989 Galerie Gomboc, Perth
1989 Holdswoth Galleries, Sydney
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Australian photographer who developed an influential style of commercial photography that emphasized the geometric forms of his architectural and industrial subjects.
Dupain, who exhibited his first landscape photographs while attending grammar school, studied at the East Sydney Technical College and the Julian Ashton Art School (both 1933–35), while he apprenticed from 1930 to 1934 with commercial photographer Cecil Bostock. During World War II he left his fashion- and portrait-photography studio to work for the army camouflage unit; he then worked for the Australian Department of Information (1945–47). Upon his return to studio work, he de-emphasized picturesque landscapes and portraiture in favour of the more abstract architectural and industrial imagery that established him as one of Australia’s most significant Modernist photographers.
Dupain's philosophy could be summed up in two words, simplicity and directness. With this in mind, Dupain remained an adherent of black and white photography. He felt that colour was restricting in its objectivity and that nothing was left for individual interpretation. He continued to photograph until a few months before his death in July, 1992
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Currently a Uki resident, Michael says he is now finding the motivation to expand his personal technical and broaden his expressive limits, providing a point of departure into a less safe and guarded creative space
Michael Taylor is one of Australia’s foremost Abstract Expressionist artists.
He lives and works in the Monaro where he draws his inspiration from the natural world around him. He paints the landscapes and waterscapes of southeast New South Wales, capturing their rhythms and changing atmospheres. His paintings stand at the junction of landscape and abstraction, though they often appear to melt into total abstraction.
The artist has revised and adapted his gestural abstraction over the years so as to maintain it as his own instantly recognisable visual language. As the arts author and critic Professor Sasha Grishin has noted, “Taylor is a marvellous veteran expressionist painter who, if anything, has improved with age. His sense of touch has remained assured, the gestural qualities are free and bold while the palette is brilliant, vibrant and colour-saturated….. His paintings are a source of revelation and inspiration.”
Michael Taylor graduated from the East Sydney Technical College, now the National Art School, where he was taught by the eminent artists Ralph Balson and Godfrey Miller. He has been exhibiting regularly since 1963 and has participated in numerous international and Australian exhibitions. He was the subject of a major, 50-year retrospective exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery in 2016. His work is held in a number of important collections including those of the National Gallery of Australia, all the state and regional galleries, as well as university galleries, corporate and private collections
Michael John Taylor born in Sunderland, North England, in 1939. Michael is one of Australia's most original and inspiring artists. He is a glorious painter, superb draughtsman and stimulating teacher. His achievements are numerous. He has won every major art prize down the east coast of Australia.
He trained at the prestigious Chelsea School of Art, London for five years culminating in the National Diploma of drawing and design award in 1962. He obtained his art Teacher’s certificate from Leeds University. Since immigrating to Australia in 1964 he taught Art at Lismore Secondary School for ten years until 1974, and in Technical Colleges and the Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education. He has dedicated his life to his two great loves, painting and teaching.
Micheal Simms is an award winning painter based in Sydney. Having completed degrees in psychology and film at Flinders University before winning a scholarship to study art at the Julian Ashton Art School Michael's practice brings together his interest in classical art and contemporary human behaviour to reveal hidden truths about his subjects.
Simms has been a finalist in the Shirley Hannan Portrait Prize (2020), the Percival Portrait Prize (2020), the Kennedy Art Award (2019), the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award (2019), the Lethbridge Art Award (2019), the Percival Tucker Portrait Prize (2018) and winner of both the Young Artist Prize through the Art Society of NSW (2018), and of the SBS Portrait Prize (2018). In 2017 he was a finalist in the prestigious Doug Moran Portrait Prize, the Mosman Art Prize and the Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize among others. Simms first exhibited with FLG as part of our Exploration exhibition series in 2017. His work is in numerous private collections including the Elliott Eyes Collection, the Thomas Keneally Centre at the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts, Cliftons Venues, Sydney, YSC Consulting Sydney
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Murat is a Turkish-born Australian artist who proactively embraces the concepts of Kitsch and Camp in his art practice. Prior to relocating to Australia in 2004, Murat had a successful career in the theatre, TV and film industries, but it was not until 2011 that he succumbed to the lure of the National Art School when he enrolled in the Fine Arts program of study, achieving a long-held desire in the process. He graduated with a Master’s degree in Fine Art (research) in 2017. In 2018, he spend three months at the British School at Rome, in a fully funded artist-in-residence role and in 2021 he was selected as one of the finalists for the Dobell Prize. .
In his practice, Murat explores figuration and patterned abstraction, combining illusionistic representation and geometric compositional formats, melding Turkic and Persian ornamentation with the persuasive painting style of Western Baroque. The resulting compositions are invariably complex and multilayered, often allegorical and somethings comedic, depending of course on the viewers point of view.
As a child, Nunzio Miano loved drawing portraits of family members. He has fond memories of his grandmother and great uncle and aunt visiting from Sicily, when he would spend hours getting them to pose for him while he drew their portrait.
Nunzio now has a career as a retail creative director, which he absolutely adores, along with his “passion job” of creating art. “My two passions go hand in hand and feed each other. I get to use my brain and work with a bunch of talented people commercially, but I also need that alone time to express myself on canvas.”
When creating art, Nunzio usually works from his home. “I have the music pumping and have the time of my life. Depending on my mood, it’s either house music or old Sicilian love songs. It’s either a dance party or a meditative calm time in the studio.”
Nunzio draws on a range of sources for inspiration, from people, his thoughts, his childhood and his Sicilian heritage. “I love film, fashion, design, architecture, interiors and branding. I can’t get enough of it, and I guess that all goes into the big melting pot of inspiration.”
The creative process always changes for Nunzio, sometimes he plans paintings on paper, other times the plans are in his head. Sometimes he simply starts painting and it emerges. Nunzio mostly paints portraits, working predominantly with acrylic paint as it allows him the flexibility he needs in his painting techniques.
“I get a little deep and am always exploring emotional concepts. I’ve always been intrigued by humanity’s need to belong to tribes or cultures. The need to be loved and liked, to be popular and the need for approval. The faces depicted are quite emotional, portraying themes of despair, sorrow, desperation. While these themes can be quite dark, they are usually in bright, joyful colours. I love that contrast.”
After graduating from Monash University with a Bachelor of Arts, Ceramic Design in 1992 Patrick went on to complete his Graduate Diploma Applied Arts in 2002. In 2001 he was technical assistant for a Martin Blank workshop which fueled his passion for sculptured hot formed glass. Whilst working as a glass blowing assistant for several Melbourne artists he developed his own work hot forming solid glass male and female torso’s. He has had many exhibitions both in Australia and the USA at SOFA Chicago with Kirra Galleries 2004 where his work was much admired. In 2011 he opened his own access studio and showroom in Melbourne where he continues to work on his collection and teach.
Artist statement: “My work is hot-worked solid glass, influenced by both classical and primitive traditions of sculpture. I am interested in the body as the external expression of an internal existence. In addition to my sculpture I make a range of colourful retro inspired vases, paperweights and scent bottles.”
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Auckland-based contemporary artist Paul Hartigan is New Zealand’s leading proponent of neon art. He is also one of New Zealand’s most significant makers of public art, widely recognised for his large-scale public light commissions, which have enhanced many of its urban spaces.
His spectacular neon monochrome Colony (2004), commissioned by the University of Auckland for the Faculty of Engineering on Symonds Street, was awarded Best Public Sculpture, Metro Magazine Awards in 2006.
Prior to Colony Hartigan was commissioned by Orion NZ Ltd in 2001 to transform the public face of an electricity substation in central Christchurch. Nebula Orion is the result, a large neon work that survived the earthquake of 2011 and continues to operate today.
Other major public installation include Pathfinder (1997), on the façade of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, Whipping the Wind (1988), located on a prominent corner of Lambton Quay in Wellington, near the Beehive, and Signal-Echo (2001), on the New Lynn Community Centre in West Auckland.
All these works demonstrate an intelligent and responsive engagement with the individual requirements of each site, and the architecture with which they interface. Each of these works is integrated with and extends the environment that hosts it, becoming a vital addition to not only the store of public art in each place, but to the streetscape, to the city’s amenities and its cultural wealth.
These grand installations aptly demonstrate both Hartigan’s adept artistic vision and the flexibility of the neon medium. Though respectful of neon’s history as a signage medium, Hartigan is not restricted by it, and uses this most urban of art media to create conceptually successful, publicly accessible installations that work day and night
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Prominent Tasmanian artist Paul Snell works with photographic images; manipulating, abstracting, and redefining realities of his photographs. His highly stylised, refined and striking imagery has become iconic.
Snell has exhibited widely in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Australia and recently abroad at the Spectrum Art Fair [2013] in New York. His work is held in private and public collections nationally including Art Bank. Snell has been a finalist in many National Prizes including The Blake Prize [2011], The Geelong Print Prize [2011], The Prometheus Art Award [2011] and The Sunshine Coast Art Prize [2013] Substation Contemporary Art Prize [2014] and Tidal Art Prize [2014]. In 2012 he won both the nationally recognised Tidal Art Prize and The Flanagan Art Prize.
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Peter Churcher originally studied Music at Trinity College in London before completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Victorian College (now Deacon University) in 1991. In 2002 he was commissioned as the Australian War Artist documenting the Australian Navy in the Persian Gulf. Churcher exhibits regularly in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane and has been included in group exhibitions at Heide. Churcher’s work has been accepted in the Moet and Chandon and Archibald Prizes and he was awarded the Kings School Art Prize in 1999. His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; the Australian War Memorial; Canberra and the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria
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Peter Mclisky went to art school in his native New Zealand in the late 1960s when pop art ruled, advertising was cool, and graphic design was tactile.
"We used to use drawing boards - there were no computers," he says. "It was all scalpel knives and wax and glue and rulers and T-squares and set squares, and that was really fun - it was more like drafting. It was very precise work, using scalpels [to do] paste ups with type. Totally different idea to what you do now with graphics.
"My last few years of graphics kind of turned me off, because it was just sort of sitting behind a computer and you weren't doing anything with your hands. That's why I was doing sculpture work at the same time, probably. I needed to."
Mclisky got his first job in the ad industry in 1969. Over the next three decades he landed fun roles in advertising and design studios from Auckland to London, Paris, Sydney and finally, in 1983, Melbourne, doing everything from graphic design to set design for theatre, graphics for television, model-making for architects, illustration for Vogue, and art direction for newspapers and magazines such as Outrage.
Twenty years later he still gets visibly excited showing people around his studio at the old Boyd School in Southbank. It's inhabited by a huge cast of characters - not just his familiar giant rabbits , but many other highly graphic silhouettes - most of which are cleverly supported without the need for welding by their own shadows
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Peter was privately trained as a sculptor and was awarded Master of Philosophy (Fine Art) by the University of Newcastle.
After studying Ceramics (1973-75) and receiving a Certificate of Art (1978-79) from Newcastle School of Art & Design, Tilley completed a Master of Philosophy (Fine Art) at Newcastle University (2008-10) and spent four years working on his PhD at the same institution (2015-18). In 2018 the resulting body of work from his PhD was shown at The University Gallery in Newcastle. At the beginning of 2016, Peter Tilley had solo and collaborative work on view at Newcastle Art Gallery in A Dirty Business with Andy Devine and Andrew Styan. 2014 saw the start of Peter Tilley and Andy Devine’s joint exhibition Black Harvest, which travelled to Moree Plains Gallery, Cessnock Regional Art Gallery, Glasshouse Regional Gallery, Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre and Manly Art Gallery and Museum, until 2016. This collaboration has also seen their work win the 2016 Acquisitive Newcastle Club Foundation Painting Prize
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Philip Markham has been interested in painting since his school days in Dunedin. He originally trained as a ballet dancer, performing first with the Royal New Zealand Ballet and later overseas principally with the Royal Opera Ballet Covent Garden. His early experiences in the theatre and ballet world, combined with his love of art and painting, have provided an ideal background for his involvement in stage and costume design. After retiring as a dancer Philip became a teacher and was Head of the Wellington College Art Department for 15 years, before leaving in 1984 to become a full time painter and designer.
In recent years he has become fully involved in painting. He exhibits regularly in exhibitions around New Zealand and examples of his work can be found in public, private and corporate collections around the world.
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Pietro Spirito was born in Puglia, Southern Italy in 1981, grew up in Florence and trained artistically in Milan, where he attended the Accademia di Brera. In 2008 he moved to Berlin, where he began a path of experimentation that resulted in the transition from figuration to abstraction. He currently lives and works in Paris.
In recent works, the artist combines his interest in drawings of the human body, animals and in ceramic sculpture with the visual worlds of the social-media platform Instagram, dating app. Spirito takes motifs he finds that focus on staging and revealing the subject’s own body and address the publication of private images in a playful or provocative way. The fleeting gaze as you navigate the platforms is interrupted from the moment the artist paints.
His goal is not to create a new image, but it is an act of redesigning and feeling one’s point of view through images, exploring desire, voyeurism and the dramatic flood of image
Rachel, a New Zealand born artist, started painting in the early 1990s, becoming 2009 a full time artist.
Rachel Rush is an artist working in colours in movement overlayed with resin. She also has the funky style of street art, working with grafitti, stencils and collages to create stand-out expressions of delight. This style is Rush-Art.
I love the freedom of mixing up acrylics with resins, there are no hard rules to follow and I love watching each piece take on its own vibrancy and energy.
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Ray Crooke AM grew up in Melbourne, where after army service in WA, North Queensland and Borneo, he trained at Swinburne Tech from 1946 to 1948. Having worked for two years on Thursday Island for the Diocese of Carpentaria, he began painting scenes of island life. Comparisons with Gauguin are inevitable, though Crooke often painted people in dim interiors against a window giving onto bright light.
A long-time resident of Cairns, he travelled extensively in northern Australia and painted some remarkably evocative landscapes, such as Chillagoe 1962, Landscape with rocks in foreground 1967 and Ant Hill Country, Laura 1969, all in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. In 1966 he served as an official war artist in Vietnam. He won the Archibald Prize in 1969 for a portrait of a close friend, the writer George Johnson. In the mid-1990s he donated his collection of works by Drysdale, Friend, Olley and Boyd to Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, which mounted North of Capricorn, a major retrospective of his work that toured in 1998-1999.
Crooke is represented in all major Australian galleries and his work remains popular amongst collector
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Photographer born in Sydney. Dupain's work depicts Australian culture. Rex Dupain is the son of photographer Max Dupain.
Trained at National Art School, Sydney, NSW (1973 - 1976) then Diploma in Education, (1977 Sydney Teachers College). The Masters of Fine Arts, (1989 - 1992 University of New South Wales)
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Born in Akaroa NZ, McWhannell graduated Diploma of Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury in 1972 and has been exhibiting since 1974. McWhannell is probably best known for his paintings of people. In many of his interior works, he places silent figures in domestic settings and replaces disquiet and Gothic tones with a sense of calmness and contemplative repose where figures are depicted in soft warm colours. As a portrait painter, he considers self-portraits less problematic than using other people as models, finding there to be more freedom to make necessary distortions and to investigate the human physiognomy. The painterly surface of his self-portraits and the looseness of the brushstrokes have been for McWhannell, a technical metaphor for psychological abandonment whereby his interest lies not so much in asking “Who am I?” but “WHAT am I?”
McWhannell has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and his work is held in public and private collections throughout the country. He is represented by John Leech Gallery and Orex Gallery, Auckland New Zealand
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Poet and artist Richard Tipping has three degrees including a doctorate from the University of Technology, Sydney (2007), and worked as an academic in media arts before switching to art full time. His works incorporate his own poetic texts with three dimensional forms in engraved stone sculpture, in original and altered sign designs, and in graphics on paper. He has held solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane and internationally in London, Cologne, Munich, Washington and New York, USA. He has completed public and private sculptural commissions throughout Australia and internationally in New York and London. His work is held by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney among other key collections, as well as in many regional art galleries; and internationally by the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York
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Born in England in 1954, Robert Billington moved to Australia from the U.K. at the age of 18 with a Nikon F2 Camera as a method of recording his new life. Inspired by Mirella Ricciardis’ book Vanishing Africa, Robert set about becoming a professional photographer.
Working for the Elton Ward Photographic Studio (1980), Robert studied portraiture and the art of photography. In 1994, Robert won the prestigious Australian Photographer of the Year by the Australian Institute of Professional Photographers (AIPP). He then continued on to win over 100 medals in both Australia and England, winning the prestigious Hasselblad Masters Award twice (1988, 1992).
Whilst working professionally Robert continued to photograph personal fine art photographs, steering towards Black & White quirky street shots and the Australian landscape. Now some 25 years later the results of his photographic journals and art are now viewed on this website. His photographs are often dramatic and moody, some say theatrical, humorous and inventive, sometimes posed and studied, occasionally throwing caution to the wind in his pursuit of the beguiling and beautiful, clearly influenced by a knowledge of art.
With his young family in tow, Robert moved to Arcadia, North of Sydney in 1988. Robert started shooting images for his first book, Rustic Paradise. These shots captured a unique part of Australia. Arcadia was then a community largely untouched by the hustle and bustle of city life, and the images Robert created were humorous, emotional, quirky, and very Australian. Max Dupain hailed the book “a classic”. His list of publications has now grown to include nine books.
The images were quickly collected by both national and state galleries. In 2000 and 2001, the Museum of Sydney recognized his unique photographs with two exhibitions. Robert’s work has also been widely published and exhibited in New York, London, throughout Europe and included in the worldwide M.I.L.K exhibition.
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Robert R Bliss was born in Newton, Massachusetts.
He attended school at Bowdoin College, Maine, and was drafted into military service (radar technician) during World War II. At that time, he started to create his first figurative paintings, which were self-portraits.
After his discharge, Robert Bliss studied painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and with Carolyn Wyeth in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
In 1951, he became the art educator and gallery director at Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, Massachusetts.
After his departure in 1964, he settled in Hull, Massachusetts, where he befriended and studied with the artist Samuel Rose (1941-2008). In the following years, he created most of his body of work, which he sold through local galleries and gift shops.
Robert Bliss died of a ruptured thoracic aneurysm on January 11, 1981
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Robert Hague is an artist who brings an impeccable skill set to the contemporary scene. Throughout his work, he revels in ambiguity, conveying simultaneously elements of the heavy and light, the fixed and fluid and the brutal and gentle. He works across numerous media including, printmaking, video, painting and installation but with a concentration on sculpture, in both stone and metal.
From his studio in Newport, Melbourne, he has exhibited widely and is represented in major public collections such as the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2010 his work was the subject of a ten year retrospective at Deakin University (Burwood). Recent exhibitions include Common Ground at NGV International, Melbourne; Porcelaine at Turner Galleries, Perth; the Blake Prize (awarded the Blake Residency); CRUSH at Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne; the Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Inaugural at Nicholas Projects, Melbourne.
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Loughlin was well-known as a picker and dealer of mid-century furniture who sold to high-end interior designers and artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He started painting his iconic "brute", the square-jawed man smoking a cigarette, in the early 1980s and used found objects such as furniture, textiles, boxes and even other artist's paintings as his canvases.
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Robert Mapplethorpe was born November 4, 1946, in Floral Park, New York. He left home in 1962 and enrolled at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, in 1963, where he studied painting and sculpture and received his B.F.A. in 1970. During this time, he met artist, poet, and musician Patti Smith. She encouraged his work and posed for numerous portraits when they lived together in Brooklyn and in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, a gathering place for artists, writers, and musicians in the early 1970s.
Mapplethorpe had his first substantial shows in 1977, both in New York: an exhibition of photographs of flowers at the Holly Solomon Gallery and one of male nudes and sadomasochistic imagery at the Kitchen. Mapplethorpe’s diverse work—homoerotic images, floral still lifes, pictures of children, commissioned portraits, mixed-media sculpture—is united by the constancy of his approach and technique. The surfaces of his prints offer a seemingly endless gradation of blacks and whites, shadow and light, and regardless of subject, his images are both elegant and provocative. In the mid-to-late 1980s, returning to the sculptural use of photography seen in his early assemblages, Mapplethorpe created sensual diptychs and triptychs of photographs printed on fabric and luxurious cloth panels. In 1988, four major exhibitions of his work were organized: by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; and the National Portrait Gallery, London. Mapplethorpe died due to complications from AIDS on March 9, 1989, in Boston
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Rod was born in the land of nipaluna / Hobart and grew up in the somewhat carefree 60’s swimming in the waters of takina / Port Dalrymple. His maternal family came to Tasmania as 2nd fleet convicts settling in the New Norfolk area.
Being almost literally the only ‘gay in the village’ in the 60/70’s was no particular joy so at the first opportunity he escaped Tasmania as a cultural refugee to the mainland.
A background iin Sciences, InfoTech and has completed a Masters of Arts Degree from COFA University of NSW.
Rod has also been an official photographer with Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras for several years to document the amazing expression of life that this world famous event portrays
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Roberto Ferri, an artist based-in Italy, offers you a glimpse of Baroque fine art paintings, incredibly crafted in surreal and hyper-realistic compositions. Inspired by the old masters, particularly Caravaggio, Ferri creates a series of stunning artworks in pure sensual elegance cloaked with emotional tensions and allegorical symbolism. The featured pieces below seem to depict the narratives of good & evil in gorgeous, poetic art paintings.
“Each of my paintings carries a message containing symbols and allegories whose interpretation depends on the viewers: the message travels in two opposite directions concerning both intellectual tension and perception.”
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Ross Watson specialises in interpolating representations of lithe semi-naked men into copies of paintings by masters such as Vermeer, Ter Borsch, David and Bronzino. Having studied at the Queensland College of Art, Watson moved to Melbourne, where he held his first solo show at the Acland Street Gallery in 1984. Since then has only worked as a painter - although he did paint trompe l'oeuil murals for Harrods for a time. He has traded through his own Ross Watson Gallery in North Carlton since 2000. Between 1996 and 2001 Watson produced a series of posed figure studies of a barely-clad Ian Roberts in lurid studio settings. The portrait of Mitcham is from a series titled Classic de Novo II, which includes paintings featuring Kylie Minogue's backing dancer Marco Da Silva; Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears; hardcore adult film stars Alex Baresi and François Sagat; and retired High Court judge Michael Kirby. Watson's work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and many private collections, notably that of Sir Elton John, whose early support encouraged the artist. The National Portrait Gallery acquired Waton's portrait of Ian Roberts after the French baroque painter Coypel, from a series titled Galerie des Glaces, in 2004
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Roy de Maistre (Roi (Leroy) de Mestre) CBE (1894-1968), painter, studied music at the Sydney Conservatorium, but was also a student at the RAS School with Dattilo Rubbo and later the Sydney Art School with Julian Ashton.
A pioneer of post-impressionism and cubism in New South Wales, he first exhibited with Roland Wakelin and Grace Cossington Smith in Sydney in 1916. During the war he became fascinated by the relationship between music and colour, and in 1919 he painted some of the earliest purely abstract art in Australia, if not the world.
Over the 1920s he travelled back and forth between Europe and Australia, founding the Contemporary Group with Thea Proctor and George Lambert, but in 1930 he settled in London, where he concocted a new identity and lived until his death. He was a dear friend of Patrick White, who became a major collector of his work, and Francis Bacon, who was significantly influenced by de Maistre's painting style. He was also friendly with John Rothenstein, art critic and director of the Tate Gallery, and after several exhibitions in England and a conversion to Catholicism he was commissioned to paint the Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral. He is represented in all major Australian galleries, and the Tate
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Sam Abercromby, born Australia 1947 moved to Portugal in 1986. His work has been displayed in over 70 exhibitions, some international. Various portrait commissions including European aristocratic families. Awarded prizes in the Parmelia Portrait Prize (´76, ´77 and 78´). Permanent exhibition of his Sequentialism paintings in Brogueira (Portugal). Currently (2018) working on his Sebastianism Revisited series, a personal renegotiation of the national mythology around the life and death of El-Rei Sebastião I of Portugal.
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Sam Fullbrook was an Australian artist who was a winner of the Archibald Prize for portraiture and the Wynne Prize for landscape. He was described as “last of the bushman painters” (a rural art tradition). However Fullbrook was fine art-trained and his sophisticated works are in every State art museum in Australia and international collections.
Fullbrook was born in the inner city suburb of Chippendale in Sydney in 1922.
His first solo exhibition was held at the Waterside Workers’ Hall, Sydney in 1952. The same year, he had a second solo show at the Moreton Gallery, Brisbane and received honourable mention in the Archibald Prize for his portrait of his contemporary, potter Bernard Sahm. Fullbrook then travelled west across Australia, setting up a studio in Marble Bar in Western Australia, also working as a miner, cane cutter and stockman.
Artist Robert Jacks said he painted “some of the most beautiful portraits ever painted in Australia.” Among them are former Australian Governor-General Sir John Kerr and media entrepreneur Reg Grundy; others include Pat Brown and Bernard Sahm, artists, jockeys and members of the public. The Kerr portrait was submitted to hang in Parliament House but was rejected for being “caricature”.
Fullbrook’s light and airy works were soft figuration bordering on abstraction in high-tone coloured patches but leaving the subject entirely recognisable. Most of his paintings and scenes were about his personal interests and life experiences. He painted in oils and worked in pastels and watercolour as well as exhibiting drawings. Reviewing a 1995 National Gallery of Victoria exhibition, Racing Colors, art critic Robert Nelson described him as:
“A colourist… Fullbrook’s forte lies in the difficult balancing of patches of pinks and teal, or striations of lilac and dashes of cadmium green.”
Fullbrook won the Archibald Prize in 1974 with the painting Jockey Norman Stephens. He won the Wynne Prize in 1963 with Sandhills on the Darling, and shared the Wynne Prize the following year with Trees in a Landscape showing Jacarandas in a Sydney scene.
Throughout the 1960s to 2001 his works were included in national tours and tours to the U.S. He exhibited in New York in 1989. Fullbrook had solo shows in galleries in every Australian state.
Fullbrook’s works are in national and all state museum collections. A prolific artist, he has been collected in every major Australian museum, every state museum and in many city gallery collections, clubs and Universities. He has been collected commercially and privately in Australia, the United States, Canada, China, Japan, the U.K., New Zealand, Europe and Malaysia.
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Scott Whitaker is an Australian visual artist, based on the Sunshine Coast hinterland north of Brisbane, where he keeps bees. Whitaker is also the founding director of Doggett Street Studio, Brisbane, Queensland which opened in 1993.
He describes his paintings and sculptures, created from rusted metal, wax and fibreglass, as a whimsical look at the social structures of society and uses the immediate environment as an inspiration for his works.
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Born in Kampot, Cambodia, Sokquon has studied at Liverpool TAFE and UWS, undertaking a Graduate Certificate and Associate Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Visual Arts.
He has exhibited extensively since the late 80s and has been a finalist in the Woollahra Sculpture Prize and the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. His work is held in numerous private and corporate collections throughout Australia, Germany, Malaysia, USA, Norway, Sweden and China. Iin 2009, Sokquon exhibited with the prestigious Olsen Gallery in Sydney, Australia.
A painter in the romantic tradition, Tran’s work possess all the elements of the intangible which characterized the visionary works of artists such as Delacroix and inspired thinkers including Nietzsche and musicians, Wagner and Schubert. For the first time throughout history, the Romantics sought to portray the essence of spirituality, or ‘God’, without referring directly to religious iconography.
Sokquon Tran’s sublime landscapes reveal to us a beauty and mystery which speak to us of a greater power than ourselves, transcending place and portraying an echo and a visceral response to it. The exact location is of lesser significance than the sense of sheer beauty and of the magic of the land itself
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Steven F. Arnold was an American artist and protégé of Salvador Dali, was a visionary filmmaker, photographer, painter, illustrator, set and costume designer, and assemblage artist. With a Surrealist’s eye for proliferating detail; he transformed his subjects, nearly all of them nudes, into gods and goddesses—winged, crowned, and levitating.
With a cheeky approach to myth and mystery, Steven Arnold was driven to find new modes of expression. From 1982 – 1989 Arnold designed and photographed tableau-vivants, and left thousands of living tableau photographs and negatives unpublished. This work is a synthesis of multiple art forms combining painting, assemblage sculpture, theatre, ballet, filmmaking, video, drawings, operas, and writings as a reflection of the culture. With absolute control within his studio environment, Arnold’s models become actors in the worlds he created. These Gods and Goddesses are tangible illusions because Arnold made them exist. Many of the figures are androgynous, in the act of self-realization, and shown at the moment of ultimate self-discovery. In an attempt to reach a universal audience, Steven Arnold uses an assemblage of collected symbologies. As a result, this body of work finds itself turning into reliquaries or shrines.
Arnold was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, and succumbed to his illness in 1994.
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Painter Terry Matassoni completed a Diploma of Fine Art in 1980 and a postgraduate diploma in art in 1982 at the Victorian College of the Arts, and later a Master of Fine Art at Deakin University in 2001. He has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Fremantle, Italy and Auckland, New Zealand, and in group shows in Toronto, Denmark, Berlin and Chicago. In 1992 he painted a tram for the Victorian Ministry of the Arts and was artist in residence at St John Baptiste College in New York in 1993. In 2003 a retrospective of his work was held at the Deakin University Stonington Stables. Matassoni was awarded the Sir Russell Drysdale Memorial Prize for Drawing in 1981 and the Broadford Prize in 1987. In 2012 he had a major curated exhibition spanning 23 years of work at The Maroondah Art Gallery. His work is held by the National Gallery of Victoria, VIC Heide Museum of Modern Art, VIC, The Museum of New Zealand , the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Artbank, Sydney; the Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, and several regional and university.
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Born in Stuttgart in 1954, the German artist Tilmann Krieg is a photographic painter. The pictures appear blurred, as if intentionally taken out of focus and overlapping with other pictures. Thus these fleeting elements achieve a different meaning in terms of their representation and topicality than the elements of classical photography. The artist aims at something else that goes beyond mere appearance and confidence in a superficial representation. The more the figures merge into the flow of time and transience, the more the images become paintings, far more than photographic images, and convey both a poetic dimension and a dense, lyrical atmosphere. This is particularly evident in the dynamic images of the Metro series, which the artist treats as one of his main themes. The urban environment becomes an iconographic synonym for the everyday life and identity of the modern individual. Modern people are constantly on the move, always on the way somewhere. This contemporary type appears in these paintings as anonymous figures whose identity disappears in the rhythm of their busy everyday life. The gaze seems to follow the vanishing figures, which are interwoven in light and shadow. Involuntarily one thinks of an urban womb that offers protection to these anonymous beings. In this sense, these photographic images symbolize the fleeting character of all existence: beings in motion, apparitions in the flow of time, figures that melt into shadows and finally disappear into nothingness
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Todd Fuller graduated from Sydney's National Art School in 2010, since then he has established himself as an influential artist, curator and educator. Fuller's practice integrates sculpture, animation, drawing, performance and painting to construct layered, multi-disciplinary narratives
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Tom O'Hern is a Hobart based artist whose practice spans murals, painting, animation and drawing. His work explores primitivism, masculinity and suburbia (scrawling penises on toilet walls). Tom completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours at the University of Tasmania in 2006 and was included in the 2011 Primavera at the MCA. He has shown widely in Australia and undertaken residencies in Hobart, France and China. Tom is represented by Bett Gallery, Hobart.
Tom O’Hern was the recipient of the 2012 Rosamond McCulloch Studio Residency, Arts Tasmania Travelling Scholarship for a graduate of a Visual Arts program from the University of Tasmania. The residency took him to Paris where he executed a body of work exploring themes of the savage, domestication, urban sprawl and environmental degradation. O’Hern’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Flux Factory, New York and the Adelaide Fringe Festival.
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Tony Albert is a politically-minded artist provoked by stereotypical representations of Aboriginal people and the colonial history that attempts to define him, and what Aboriginality is, in the present. Albert has spent the majority of his life in Brisbane, but has strong family connections further north to the Girramay and Kuku Yalanji people of the rainforest region. In 2004 he completed a degree in Visual Arts, majoring in Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art, at Griffith University, while also undertaking a traineeship at the Queensland Art Gallery for the major exhibition, Story place: Indigenous art of Cape York and the Rainforest, 2003. Albert remained at the gallery as an exhibitions project officer and Indigenous trainee coordinator until 2007, when he left to focus on his artwork.
Along with Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee, Albert is a founding member of the Brisbane-based collective, proppaNOW, which was officially incorporated in 2006. Like Bell and Ah Kee, the use of text as a provocative device is central to Albert’s practice. By taking control of language and using it to interrogate cultural alienation, Albert shifts the power balance that has existed within language, and has been used to subjugate Aboriginal people since Cook took possession of this country in 1770 under the doctrine of ‘terra nullius’.
Tristan Chant is a multi-disciplinary artist working across print, collage and textile mediums. His practice initiates a dialogue about our relationship to images and the way in which we consume them. Mining images from art history, adult magazines, children’s books and popular media, Chant’s work is at turns political, humorous, and poetic. Chant holds a Bachelors Degree from the National Art School and a Masters of Arts Administration from UNSW Art & Design. He has been a finalist in the Fisher Ghost Award, Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award, KAAF Art Prize, Waverley Art Prize and the Mosman Art Prize.
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Vernon Ah Kee (born 1967) is an Australian award-winning artist, political activist and founding member of ProppaNOW. He is an Aboriginal Australian man with ties to the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples in Queensland, Australia. His art practice typically focuses on his Aboriginal Australian identity and place within a modern Australian framework. He is a contemporary artist, based primarily in Brisbane, and is regarded as one of Australia's most prominent, active artists. Ah Kee has exhibited his art at numerous galleries across Australia, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW)[1] and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. He has also exhibited internationally, most notably at the 2009 Venice Biennale and the 2015 Istanbul Biennial, having been chosen to represent Australia.
Ah Kee has a very diverse art practice, using a broad range of techniques and media such as painting, installation, photography and text-based art. He is particularly renowned for his manipulation of colonial language and imagery to highlight racial issues in Australia. His exhibitions generally receive positive reviews and his works are hosted in both public and private collections around the world
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Waratah Lahy is an artist and art teacher based in Canberra, Australia. In 2007, she completed a Doctorate of Philosophy at the Australian National University's School of Art. Her thesis explored the depiction of Australian culture.
Waratah Lahy has produced a varied collection of works, all pertaining to a common interrogation of the way in which we perceive the world. In 2018, Lahy won the M16 Art Space Drawing Award, was awarded the Hill End Artist in Residence Program, selected as a finalist in the Grace Cossington Smith Art Award and the Splash McClelland Contemporary Watercolour Award. She participated in 'Painting Amongst Other Things' at the School of Art & Design Gallery at ANU with a series of magic lantern slides illuminated by small lights. This series informed the direction of her subsequent body of work for her 2019 solo exhibition 'Hand Held World' at MAY SPACE. 2017 also saw Lahy produce two solo shows: 'Everyday' at MAY SPACE and 'Three Hundred and Sixty Six' at Canberra Contemporary Art Space. Following these exhibitions the series entered the collection of the University of Canberra Hospital: Specialist Centre for Rehabilitation where it is on permanent display
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Vicki Varvaressos is an Australian contemporary figurative expressionist painter. Sometimes referred to as a “transitional artist”, her painting style and subject matter has evolved throughout her career. Many of her works are of women and their experiences in Australia.
“All of my work has been a reflection of what I’m interested in. The early work is very much issues, and there were other issues apart from feminism, but the feminism stuff was there. Then the images became much more internal — ‘human existence’” - Vicki Varvaressos
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Wes Hempel has been committed to reimagining the depiction of masculinity in contemporary art. By setting psychologically acute portraits of modern-day males against backgrounds appropriated from such disparate sources as Neoclassical history painting and Dutch Golden Age landscapes, the artist’s works forge provocative dialogues between the exigencies of the present and its endowments from the past.
Joining the symbolic incarnations and technical fluency of classical art with the eclectic borrowings of Postmodernism, Hempel’s paintings explore the divide between the ancient and modern, reason and passion, the august and the quotidian. Provoking a reconsideration of assumed narratives of masculinity and myth, sociocultural examinations are rendered in sensuously modeled flesh tones, gleaming marble surfaces, and the immersive calm of Arcadian landscape – proving as visually alluring as they are conceptually rigorous.
Hempel was born in El Monte, California, and received his BA in 1985 from California State University in Northridge. He then studied at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he received his MA in 1988. He has shown his work in both solo and group exhibitions across the country since 1987. Public and corporate collections, such as the Denver Art Museum and Microsoft Corporation, also contain his work. The artist’s painting Loophole is noted as the visual and conceptual nucleus of “Truth & Beauty: The Bach Project,” a 2010 ballet created by Ballet Austin artistic director Stephen Mills and featuring the music of J.S. Bach and Phillip Glass.
Since the mid-1990s, Hempel has frequently collaborated on paintings with Jack Balas, an artist who works in both painting and photography
Born in NSW in 1928, Wilfred Asplin worked as a theatrical stage designer from 1948 to 1960. From 1956 he taught art and became an art master of teh Sydney Correspondence School in 1974. His painting, mostly in acrylic, are inspired by his interest in music and the theatre.
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William Yang is one of Australia’s most celebrated independent photographers and performers. Born William Young in North Queensland in 1943, he changed his name to William Yang in 1983. He worked as a playwright from 1969 to 1974, and since then as a freelance photographer. His first solo exhibition in 1977, Sydneyphiles, caused a sensation because of its frank depiction of the Sydney gay scene. Later these photographs became part of a larger exhibition, Sydney Diary, which was published as a book of the same title in 1984. In the mid-eighties, William Yang began to explore his Chinese heritage which had hitherto been lost to him by his complete assimilation into the Australian way of life. His photographic themes expanded to include landscapes and the Chinese in Australia. During this period he made visits to China.
