PROFILE: TAMARA MENDELS
Through my work I investigate the notion of painting as an automatic spontaneous expression and at the same time the automatism achieved through a rigid set of rules and constructs. Use of a mechanical process and various pouring vessels such as garden hoses, jugs and watering spouts assures no gesture of the hand, in a more traditional sense, is evident in the work. Conceptually, my work is about (de)constructing modes of abstraction; concealment and the revealing of dynamic tension between foreground, background and surface.
Visit Tamara Mendels’ website HERE
PROFILE: JOHN CALDWELL
Born in Sydney in 1942 and following schooling there, Caldwell spent ten years in the pastoral industry, primarily in the Channel Country of south western Queensland. He travelled overseas for three years, working in London and travelling in Ireland and the Continent.
Returning to Sydney in 1972 he studied for four years at the University of New South Wales, completing an honours degree in English Literature. Since 1977 he has worked full time as an artist, with more than forty solo exhibitions, and many joint and group exhibitions throughout Australia.
The primary focus of his work is the natural landscape where there is little or no evidence of a human presence. From regular working trips throughout Australia and overseas, he gathers the reference material that results in his finished studio work.
His overseas working trips include the UK and Europe in 1979; Bali, New Caledonia, Vanuatu and Tahiti in the 1980s, France and Cornwall in 1994, China and London 2012, and the USA in 2014.
His paintings, drawings and printmaking have also encompassed portraiture, figurative and still life subjects and he conducts a programme of painting and drawing workshops in his Blackheath studio.
Visit John’s webiste HERE
PROFILE: DAVID MIDDLEBROOK
David Middlebrook has an art career spanning 25 years including 30 solo exhibitions along the east coast of Australia (Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and Newcastle). He received numerous awards and has received a PhD (University of Newcastle) for his studies and work in Australian landscape painting and art history.
David spends five days per week painting and drawing in his Blue Mountains studio and two days as a sessional lecturer and tutor at the University of Newcastle.
Visit David’s website HERE
PROFILE: PETER ELFES
In a career spanning 35 years Peter has seen his photography art work finds its way into private and public collections in Australia and overseas, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Powerhouse Museum the Museum of Contemporary Art and the New South Wales Parliament.
Peter Elfes was born in Sydney and grew up in the inner city suburb of Darlinghurst. Influenced and inspired by his father, a photojournalist who emigrated from Greece in the 1950’s, he developed a strong connection with the art of photography from an early age.
After working in his father’s studio for a few years, Peter began work in 1981 at Freeman Studio in Sydney, the second oldest, still running photographic studio in the world, and became its manager. In 1991, he left Freeman Studio and moved to New York to further his knowledge of the art of photography. Returning to Sydney in1992, he began working as a freelance photographer and was the official photographer for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Association for ten years.
Peter has a longstanding interest in environmental and social documentary photojournalism. He has a personal dedication to people and nature as the subjects of photographic essays and an enthusiasm for the value of the photographic medium in highlighting the importance of preserving natural heritage around the globe.
Recently he travelled to remote areas in Australia and the South Pacific and returned with dramatic photographic essays of long treks through diverse environments and meetings with Indigenous people. Peter’s Lake Eyre Series and other photo projects have been internationally published in books and magazines.
In 2011 Peter Elfes was awarded 1st prize in the New South Wales Plein Air Photography Award for his photograph of the Barrier Range in North West New South Wales.
Visit Peter Elfes’ website HERE
PROFILE: JAMES BLACKWELL
Blue Mountains artist, James Blackwell, has been exhibiting since 1999 with more than 30 shows to his credit including a solo exhibition, Second Nature’ at Bathurst Regional Gallery and was included in Making Ground group show at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre in 2013.
He has received a number of awards and opportunities including; Artist in Residence at Hill End 2011, Artist in Residence at the Bundanon Trust NSW in 2013, The Sydney Water Sculpture Prize and the Fletcher Trust award in 2000 and was a finalist in the Blake Prize in 2003. He was also commissioned artist to Emirates Wolgan Valley Resort in 2009.
James Completed a BFA (Hons) in 2002 at the National Art School in Sydney. Blackwell’s contemplative and elegant works have attracted a considerable following in recent years, intriguing their audience with his meticulous craftsmanship and innovative use of natural materials.
” The onslaught, pace and ubiquity of change in modern life has said to have altered the way our brains are being wired. Our ability and need to adapt to this continuous flux leaves us reaching out for something concrete, something familiar, and something certain. My art practice is an attempt to reestablish a connection with nature and offer pause and reflection in an intimate space as an antidote to the barrage of stimulation, which has taken host in our ever-evolving technological world.
My anchor is the landscape in which I live…..the Blue Mountains of NSW. Here, the seasons are distinct, reliable and inevitable. This landscape adapts to the backdrop of seasons and offers inspiration in it’s repetition and symmetry. A value embodied in the artwork I create.
Using natural materials found from the landscape, I ‘play’ with symmetry and form using paper as a support to create 3 dimensional assemblages, which require an intimate viewing. I am aware of repetition and symmetry in my life on many levels; From the continuance of daily life and the activities which we need to carry out repetitively such as bathing and brushing ones teeth, to the reiteration of form found at the intrinsic and infinitesimal level of nature.
The elements, which make up the matrix of my work, represent the interconnectedness with the environment. My artwork is not representational in any sense, but still it represents to me, the landscape in its undulating form, colour, symmetry and rhythm.
Paper is a reconstitution of fibres found in nature, and a wonderfully diverse medium to use. The textural quality of paper complements the materials woven and constructed on the surface of the work. Sometimes, I may remain with a theme and variations of a particular way of folding paper to reveal a structural representation of simplicity, elegance, and quietude. Symmetry is the vehicle by which I strive to attain this.” James Blackwell
James Blackwell is represented by Lost Bear Gallery, Katoomba and Janet Clayton Gallery, Sydney NSW.
Image: JAMES BLACKWELL Motherboard [detail] 2014, paper, gum nuts, 44 x 44 cm
Visit James Blackwell’s website here
PROFILE: JASON BENJAMIN
Jason Benjamin’s paintings are pure poetry, beautifully mysterious and sensitively rendered.
Born in Melbourne Benjamin traveled to New York for his art training at the Pratt Institute and returned to settle in Sydney.
His paintings span many genres undertaking still life’s, portraits and landscapes, each as emotionally charged as the next. His works in combination with their apt titles articulate a sense of longing or hope in their bid to capture a moment. Benjamin explores the desire to hold onto a memory, feeling or moment in time regardless of the reality of its ephemeral and intangible nature.
An impressive career to date he has exhibited successfully across Australia, frequently in Tokyo, Japan and both in Hong Kong and Italy. He has twice been a finalist in the Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW and has won the Packing Room Prize in 2005.
Represented in many important collections including the Australian National Gallery, Canberra and the National Gallery of Victoria. Jason Benjamin makes an exceptional contribution to the ongoing importance of the Australian landscape genre.
Jason Benjamin is represented by Michael Reid Gallery
For more information please visit Jason Benjamin’s website
Image: JASON BENJAMIN Post History 2011 oil on linen, 180 x 180 cm
Biography courtesy of Michael Reid Gallery
PROFILE: RACHEL PEACHEY & PAUL MOSIG
PROFILE: GRAHAM McCARTER
Looking at Graham McCarter’s work, it might seem difficult at first to locate a central focus. He has been everything: fashion photographer, commercial photographer, gallery photographer, photographic teacher, photographic student, photojournalist. He is often thought of as a portrait photographer, which is getting closer to the truth. Graham himself, if forced to define his approach, finally describes himself as a “people photographer”. But it isn’t simply people whom McCarter photographs; it is almost always people in their environment. Their work environment, their home environment, in their landscapes, in their studios, in their bedrooms; and often their environment is almost as important, pictorially, as the people themselves. The environment often synthesises and reflects back something about the character of the person, illuminates them in a way which a straightforward studio shot wouldn’t. His exhibition ‘Blackheath Portraits +2’ is on exhibition at Blue Mountains Cultural Centre from 29 August – 19 October 2014
PROFILE: SUSAN AND PETER O’DOHERTY
SUSAN O’ DOHERTY
Susan was born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1960. Her father was an officer in the Australian Army and due to the family moving annually her peripatetic childhood led to a constant sense of rebuilding an identity.
She is a self-taught artist and has exhibited in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Wellington, New Zealand. Central to Susan’s art practice are her mixed media assemblages and constructions which, apart from social issues, deal in her own words with the ethereal nature of time – recollections, experiences, lives lived and an awareness of mortality. Her three dimensional wall pieces incorporate found objects – furniture, clocks, tape measures, dominoes, doll parts, telephones, kitchen appliances, lead light windows, wall switches, light fittings, taps and fabrics. These reconfigured assemblages embody new life and meaning into discarded and abandoned objects. Susan is also a painter. Her paintings range from gestural semi-abstract landscapes to figurative portraits.
Recent solo shows ‘The Perfect Woman’, ’It’s a Man’s World’ and ‘The Nature of Time’ examine identity and gender issues. A major touring exhibition of her work was the project ‘900 Eyes, Domestic Lives’, where 450 painted portraits of visual arts practitioners hung in large format panels were exhibited in 2008 at Manly Art Gallery and Museum and in 2009 at Tweed River Art Gallery and Maitland Regional Art Gallery. In 2009 she participated in Macquarie University Gallery’s Reimag(in)ing SomaSex, an exhibition examining trans gender issues. In 2013 Susan created a large window display in ‘Diarama’ a group exhibition at Wollongong Art Gallery using the language of the diarama to explore real or imaginary environments. Her work has been included in many other group shows and art prizes.
Commencing at Cowra in 2014 and running over the next two years Susan has a collaborative touring regional gallery exhibition ‘Moving House’ with her artist husband Peter O’Doherty, combining her assemblages depicting various rooms of the house and his canvases of external suburban house facades.
Susan is represented by Spot 81, Sydney.
PETER O’ DOHERTY
Born 1958, Auckland, New Zealand
Emigrating with his family from New Zealand to Australia in the late 1960’s, Peter O’Doherty is a self-taught painter. He has been exhibiting regularly over the past 20 years in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and internationally in England and New Zealand.
There has been a concentration on urban and suburban themes in his work – fibro and brick houses, blocks of flats, high rise facades, front yards, porches, and garages along with chairs, aeroplanes, trams and landscapes. His representational paintings are tonal assemblages of oblique geometric detail imbued with dense shadow and vivid Australian light.
O’Doherty has been hung in numerous art prizes including the Sulman and the Salon Des Refuses. He has won the Paddington Art Prize for landscape, the Commendation Award at the Mosman Art Prize and the Alan Gamble Memorial Prize for the built environment.
Commencing in 2014 and running over the next two years Peter has a collaborative touring regional gallery exhibition ‘Moving House’ with his wife Susan O’Doherty, combining her assemblages depicting various rooms of the house and his canvases of external suburban house facades.
For two decades he was prominent musically as bass player in the band ‘Mental As Anything’. Nowadays, as a musical outlet, he and his brother, painter, musician and illustrator Reg Mombassa / Chris O’Doherty perform and release albums together as Dog Trumpet.
Peter is represented in Sydney by King Street Gallery on William and in Melbourne by Gould Galleries.
PROFILE: LINDA SEIFFERT
Linda Seiffert is an artist based in The Blue Mountains, Australia. She specialises in ceramics and works in a variety of other mediums. Graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Ceramics) from The National Art School Sydney, she was awarded the Graduating Student Award for excellence and has since received a multitude of accolades for her distinctive sculpture.
In her studio Linda produces work for exhibitions, commissions, commercial and community projects. A passionate and experienced teacher of ceramics, she lecturers in The National Art Schools HSC Extension Program and has taught in the undergraduate program. Linda’s artistic investigations span a broad scope of ideas and contexts, her subject matter shifting and evolving with each new project. The natural world has been a long standing muse for Linda’s work, her quiet observations culminating into expressive, emotive forms. Most recently, her research explores the transitional zones between the manmade and natural environment. It ponders the existing incongruity of these conditions as a symptom of our human separation from the natural world, and recognises the tenuous experience of navigating between these contrasting environments. At its heart Linda’s work reflects on our relationship with the natural world and our place within it.
‘My practice inquiries into the mystery, diversity and dynamism of the natural world. Nature’s infinitely evolving expressions flow through my work. I am interested in drawing visual connections from organic forms and processes, observing microcosmic and macrocosmic patterns, translating them through abstract, organic sculptural forms. Working with clay and the natural world is an intuitive process which reveals physical and behavioural patterns which reflect structures that exist throughout our lives.’
Linda Seiffert
