John Coburn carved out a highly influential career spanning more than five decades - unlike many of his peers he mastered a variety of mediums including painting, printmaking and tapestry design. His objective as an artist was simply to express his personal experiences with the natural world
Robert Klippel was Australia’s most significant sculptor. He died in Sydney in 2001 on his eight-first birthday, Tuesday 19th June, after almost sixty years of artistic output. He was a gentle and quiet man who shunned publicity and generally he was not as well known as he deserved. Nonethel
‘The faces with flowers, with their burning tensions between the trapped, withdrawing and withdrawn girls and young children and the flowers that they held, or proffered, or gazed down at, or through, were moments of revelation, but essentially moments in isolation: the faces responded and o
The suburb of Melbourne’s St Kilda is etched deeply into Sidney Nolan’s psyche, it was where he spent his early years surrounded by family and would return to later in life for artistic inspiration. In the late nineteenth century, St Kilda was regarded as one of Melbourne most fashionable an
‘If there is such a thing as reincarnation… I would love to come back as a bower bird’.1
Almost more than any other subject, Brett Whiteley painted birds – whether as individual studies of the winged creatures or as part of a larger composition, birds gave the ar
James Mollison AO, the founding Director of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, always thought of Klippel as the most extraordinary manipulator of three-dimensional form he had ever seen. Ken Scarlett, the author and respected Australian sculpture scholar, rightly considers Klippe
One of the best known artists in Australia is William Kentridge. In fact he is not Australian, but a South African who belongs to the international avante-garde. Although he was born and continues to live in South Africa, he works everywhere, and is nowadays continuously busy, well-
Reading Julian Barnes’ Keeping an Eye Open has introduced me to a painter I was vaguely aware of: Felix Vallotton, the turn of the century Swiss artist, and friend of Bonnard and Vuillard. Vallotton is a fairly obscure artist, and yet he comes alive in Barnes’ excellent book. Of par
John Olsen is widely thought of as Australia’s greatest living artist. His earliest recorded paintings date back to the 1940’s, and by 1960 he was an important member of the Sydney art scene and taking part in major exhibitions. Olsen still makes headlines for his art, it seems like only a f
Mount Pelion, the third highest mountain in Tasmania, is located in the central highlands and is part of the Pelion range within the Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park. On the northern side of the mountain, Forth River flows down towards Frog Flats. The present work, View of Mount P