Locations - Braidwood
Overview
Tonight we visit the majestic Shoalhaven River which has inspired artists for generations. From the casual modernism of Max Dupain's Sunbaker, taken at the river’s mouth, to the wonderfully iconic landscapes by Arthur Boyd, who was entranced by its terrain and Brett Whitely, who captured its watery heart.
Our location has been chosen by one of Australia’s most renowned landscape artists - John R Walker. John's a Braidwood local and passionate environmentalist. Even though he's a five times Archibald Prize finalist for portraiture, landscape remains his first love.
Over the next two days, local artists Kate Stevens, Trevelyan Clay, Olivia Bernardoff will work with John R Walker near the historic town of Braidwood, at the Bombay Picnic area, on the banks of the Shoalhaven river, NSW.
Master Artist
John R Walker
John R Walker was born in Sydney where he lived and exhibited until a deepening and passionate commitment to 'painting the experience of the landscape' led him to move to Braidwood five years ago. He is a five-times Archibald finalist and Wynne Prize finalist and is represented by Utopia Art Sydney. His work is in the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of Western Australia as well as other major public and private collections.
John is very knowledgeable about art history, environmental history and can reel off the Latin names of most native plants within the region. For him, the Australian landscape is not the stage, it is rather, the principal actor.
Emerging Artists
Olivia Bernadoff
Olivia completed a painting degree at Canberra school of art in 2000. Her abiding theme has been the depiction of everyday objects and ordinary life: oversized beer bottles and cigarette lighters, football crowds, traffic jams and highway milk bars. She attempts to imbue these pedestrian subjects with an eerie yet radiant quality. In the last couple of years Olivia’s painting technique has moved from hyper real to semi abstraction. She is drawn to the mystery and gesture of abstraction, but remains attached to the accessibility of representation.
Initially trained in political science at Melbourne University, Olivia has always been interested and involved in art. She has been exhibiting work since 1990 in group and solo exhibitions including at the Orange Regional Gallery, the Goulburn Regional Gallery, Canberra School of Art Gallery, Studio One and the Contemporary Art Space in Manuka.
Upcoming projects are focused primarily on research and developing ideas and techniques incorporating notions of abstraction and representation. Olivia is currently working on a proposal to obtain a residency in Lahore, Pakistan and will follow this with a research tour of Europe in 2007. She will develop paintings in response to these vastly different experiences, which will be exhibited towards the end of 2007.
She is represented by Beaver Galleries in Canberra.
Finished Work by Olivia Bernadoff
Trevelyan Clay
Trevelyan, an honours graduate from the Canberra School of Art, grew up with computer games and discovered nature late in life. His paintings are a hybrid of natural landscape, Aboriginal dot paintings and virtual game space. This contemporary diversion from the traditional oil painting genre questions reality by including figures, landscapes, pixellated patterning using a frayed dot brush and silhouettes mixed with unusual perspectives, angles and flattened space. He is currently living in Melbourne where he is working on a new series of work for an up and coming solo show at Neon Parc gallery.
Finished Work by Trevelyan Clay
Kate Stevens
Kate lives in Braidwood, having moved there recently from Canberra where she attended art school. Kate completed a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) with Honours in 2001 at the Canberra School of Art, and has since won a range of awards and scholarships. She works mainly with video footage and photographs as her source material: documenting travels through landscapes familiar and foreign. She then translates aspects of these fleeting images into oil paintings.
Kate is interested in the play that occurs between these transient photographed moments and the rich materiality of the oil paint medium. She has spent the last 6 months working on a series of paintings based upon time spent in Kathmandu, Nepal. These works are to be exhibited at the Metro 5 Gallery in Melbourne during 2007.
Finished Work by Kate Stevens
Master Class
by John R Walker
A realist painting is a 'fiction'; a painting of a tree is not a tree at all; a painting is a piece of canvas (or paper, board) covered in paint. What all 'fictions' really reveal is the mind that constructed the fiction. Self-knowledge is at the heart of being a modern artist.
Poetry is easier to find in the ordinary, than in the obviously beautiful.
Paint the places that you know instinctively and ignore nothing that might deepen your knowledge and understanding of those places.
Oscar Wilde said: "It is superficial to look for hidden meanings. The mystery is in the visible, not in the invisible." Good art has no hidden meaning.
Where Are We?
In March 2006, Braidwood became the first town in its entirety on the east coast of Australia to be listed on the NSW Heritage register. Braidwood is located 300kms south-west of Sydney and halfway between Canberra and Batemans Bay, on the south eastern edge of the Southern Tablelands.
19th century buildings abound in the main street, while 1950's workers' cottages are scattered throughout the surrounding streets and villages. Since the 1960s, the town has increasingly been called home by a growing group of artists, from writers, quilters, potters, ceramicists, weavers, painters, metalworkers, etc.
Cattle and sheep properties developed in the area in the 1820s and 1830s. In the 1850s, Braidwood's population exploded as "gold fever" hit the surrounding region (over £11 million worth of gold was found in nearby Araluen, which was known as the richest alluvial goldfield in Australia); but, as the gold ran out, the numbers declined and today, Braidwood is listed by the National Trust as an historic town with a population of 1,100.
The rural countryside of the area as well as the township of Braidwood has been used in a number of films such as “Robbery under Arms” (1921), “Ned Kelly” (1969), “The Year My Voice Broke” (1987) and “On Our Selection” (1994). Norman Hardy in the 1890s painted a number of romantic Colonial scenes set in the area.
Artists who have lived and worked in the region include Brett Whiteley and Arthur Boyd. The Australian poet, Judith Wright wrote many of her later poems near Braidwood.
BOMBAY SWIMMING HOLE
The Shoalhaven River stretches from its mouth at Shoalhaven Heads through to the Eastern side of the Great Dividing Range southwest of Sydney. It is 300 kilometres long. Bombay Swimming hole is linked to the Shoalhaven River, one kilometre away. It’s the local swimming hole for Braidwood residents.
