An Intimate Distance: conversations with artists during lockdown. 3 Hendrik Kolenberg

Studio Still life by Julianna Kolenberg

An Intimate Distance: conversations with artists during lockdown #3. Hendrik Kolenberg talks with Alexandra from his home and studio in Sydney. October 2021. What personal impact has the pandemic had on you? I don’t know anyone who has had COVID but my brother died about a month ago in Adelaide, of cancer. His eldest daughter, …

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Madrid Realists’ Exhibition Review

Madrid Realists’ Exhibition Review Lopez Garcia at the Madrid Realist Exhibition: How did these artists produce such outstanding work while the art world was declaring that painting was dead? Published in ‘The Jackdaw’ June 2016 A crowd is gathered in front of a picture, there’s shuffling and whispering, angling for a better view. Several people are up …

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Arthur Boyd: Landscape of the Soul

Shepparton Art Museum. 14th September – 24 November 2019.

Published in ‘TroubleMag’ and ‘Jackdaw’

Have you had any lessons? The enquiry came from a woman and her friend who had been loitering behind me as I painted en plein air in a local park. It seemed a particularly stupid question, especially considering the genius that was unfolding on the canvas. But even artists have never quite settled this amongst themselves. Is intellect or imagination more important?

Reflected Kangaroo 1976

Arthur Boyd and his circle chose imagination. Formal study, they held, sapped vitality. This was the view of the Angry Penguins, a group of Melbourne’s mid-twentieth century figurative artists which included Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and Boyd himself. Primitivism, surrealism and expressionism nourished their artistic vision. A position more remote from today’s conceptual gridlock can hardly be conceived.

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