Talking with Painters

You may know Dee Smart from the popular Australian television series Water Rats or Home and Away or from her feature film roles but you can now add the Archibald prize to that list.

She has been shor…

Steve Lopes is not looking to make a pretty picture. For a work to be enduring he believes ‘there has to be a level of poison in it’, some gritty quality that keeps you coming back.

His powerful pain…

John Wolseley is one of Australia’s most important artists.  He portrays the Australian landscape and its ecosystems from the roots of a tree to a whole floodplain; from trees, birds and fish to a ti…

Wendy Sharpe is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and significant painters. She won the Art Gallery of NSW’s Sulman prize in 1986 and has been powering through the art world ever since.

She went on t…

Imagine you’re out in the wilderness at least an hour’s walk from any sign of human life. It could be very hot, it could be freezing, and in front of you lies a canyon or a snow bank or a river glitt…

See the Talking with Painters YouTube video below

In 2017 a group of twelve Australian artists travelled to Belgium and France to the first World War battlefields of the western front.

They created …

Lottie Consalvo is not only a painter. She works across performance art, photography, video and sculpture.  She’s had 9 solo shows in painting alone in just 8 years and has had many more performances…

Although she first went to art school at 15, it wasn’t until she was 38 that Megan Seres started on her path to become a practising artist – when she enrolled in Sydney’s National Art School.

Then in…

If he doesn’t have a paintbrush in his hand it’s likely he’ll have a guitar because Peter O’Doherty is as much a musician and songwriter as he is a painter.

It wasn’t long after leaving high school t…

Born in the US and currently living in Australia, Renee French is an artist acclaimed for her hundreds, if not thousands, of drawings in the form of original works, art books, graphic novels, undergr…

William Mackinnon’s landscapes are at the same time familiar and unexpected. Car headlights illuminate a dark country road revealing improbable markings; a coastal scene viewed through a tangle of gu…

Vincent Fantauzzo is one of Australia’s most popular portrait artists.  He has won the Doug Moran National Portrait prize, is a four time winner of the Archibald People’s Choice award and was recentl…

Paul Ryan has had a huge year – 3 solo shows across Australia with Nanda Hobbs, Edwina Corlette and James Makin galleries as well as work being shown with all three at Sydney Contemporary. He has exh…

Prudence Flint paints women. Usually in an interior setting and often in an intimate, solitary moment. Her subject might be in the bathroom, showering, or lying on a bed staring at the ceiling or in …

Ken Done has the most widely recognised name and work of any living Australian painter. His paintings are about the good things in life – happiness, joy, beauty. And they’re about colour.  Lots of co…

Click here to hear extended interview on YouTube and scroll down for my four YouTube videos of Aida Tomescu

She fled communist Romania in 1980, arriving in Australia knowing no-one. But Aida Tomescu …

Vanessa Stockard’s work is powerful. If you look into the eyes of her ‘Self-portrait as new mum’ which is hanging in the Archibald Prize this year you’ll probably see something different to the perso…

In 2007, Archibald prize finalist, Jonathan Dalton, decided to let go of the photography business he had built up in his homeland of Ireland and started teaching himself to paint. Just two years late…

Armed with her favourite palette knife which she’s used for the last 10 years, Amanda Penrose Hart dynamically captures the landscape in paint both en plein air and in her studio.

She won the Gallipo…

He’s a musician, singer, songwriter, poet and sculptor but of course James Drinkwater is primarily a painter and one of the most exciting contemporary artists creating work in Australia today.

Drinkw…