John Leslie Art Prize 2022 Review

John Leslie Art Prize 2022 at Gippsland Art Gallery Sale, Victoria

What exactly are the key concerns of contemporary Australian landscape painting? And who wants to know? Alexandra Sasse takes you deeper into these latest landscapes in this review of the John Leslie Art Prize 2022.

Evan Salmon Exhibition 2022

Painting by Evan Salmon 'Car Carrier' 2014

Winner of the NSW Parliamentary Plein Air Award, Evan Salmon’s pared back compositions eloquently remind us that we live in the most extraordinary of worlds.

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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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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