Drawing

BVA (ACSA), MFA, PhD (UNSW)

Chelsea Lehmann has exhibited extensively in Australia for the past two decades, and has been the recipient of several awards, grants, and local and international residencies. Her most recent exhibitions include Corporealities, (Home @735 Gallery, Sydney 2020), Persona (Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney, 2020), June (MARS Gallery, Melbourne, 2019), and The Articulate Surface (UNSW Galleries, Sydney, 2018). She is a Lecturer in Drawing at the National Art School and completed a PhD at UNSW Art & Design in 2019.

Charles Cooper has exhibited since 1974 at Sydney galleries, solo at Bloomfield, Annandale and the Tin Sheds and in group shows at Macquarie, Garry Anderson, Ivan Dougherty, Macquarie University, Grace Cossington-Smith, Museum of Sydney, AGNSW (Sulman, Wynne, Dobell competitions) and in Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide, Monaco, Cambridge UK, New York, Rome, Beijing, Shanghai plus seventeen regional galleries in NSW, Victoria and Queensland (solo in 1988-89 and 2010 plus group exhibitions since 1994).

Awards include an Australia Council CEAD Grant 1996, the 1998 AGNSW Trustees’ Watercolour Prize, the 2020 Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing and residencies at Canberra School of Art ANU 2005, Cite des Arts (NAS Studio) Paris 2006, Penrith Regional Gallery 2007 and the British School at Rome (NAS Residency) 2012.

His work is in many regional collections in NSW and Victoria, Artbank and private collections.

Areas of Specialisation:

Charles’ expertises are in the areas of painting, drawing and installation.

Subjects and Courses Taught: 

DRA100 Drawing 1
DRA200 Drawing 2
DRA300 Drawing 3
MFA Supervision

Ben Denham grew up in the Blue Mountains and studied visual arts at the University of Western Sydney. He currently lives near the Cooks River, in Sydney’s inner west. These geographical locations are part of series of performance video works in which Ben reflects on his relationship to where he lives.

Another thread of his practice involves making machines to explore new ways of interfacing with the process drawing and writing.

He is currently working with synthesizers to create kinetic sculptural works, drawings and installations. He sees this as a form of expanded synthesis that can help us to understand the broader cultural significance of the synthesizer and its relationship to art, science and philosophy.

In 2002–03 Ben spent a year and a half in Mexico with the assistance of the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship. He speaks fluent Spanish and maintains connections to Latin American art and activist culture.

Ben completed his doctorate in 2009; his thesis considered the relationship between art and neuroscience, focusing on gesture and linguistic embodiment. He has a strong interest in the biological sciences and their relationship to art practice.

Areas of Specialisation: Experimental drawing, robotics, electronic art, sound art/experimental music, video performance, SciArt, BioArt, algorithmic art.

Courses and Subjects Taught:

DRA100
DRA300
MFA Supervision
DFA Supervision

medBFA (Hons), MFA (UNSW)

Joe Frost’s paintings and drawings have their origins in urban life. They depict personages and places, and express a complex sense of belonging formed from his feelings – both sympathetic and critical – about his subjects. The synthesis of observation and invention in his working process produces paintings that are layered in every sense of the word; that invite the viewer to experience seeing as an active, interpretive process.

As Laura Fisher wrote in a recent catalogue essay, “Frost practices a form of painting that echoes the selectivity of our habits of perception… where an improbable collection of visual cues coalesces to form something that feels utterly familiar and authentic. He includes things that are both visible and invisible to the eye: from the most prosaic objects of domestic life to the wake created by a person’s movement through space, from the artificial lights that punctuate our urban experience to the emotional force fields of an argument.”

Since his first exhibition with Legge Gallery in 1999 Frost’s reputation has grown steadily. He has been a lecturer at the National Art School, Sydney since 2003 and is a writer on art with more than thirty published essays and articles in newspapers, magazines, and exhibition catalogues.

Areas of Specialisation:

Drawing and painting

Subjects and Courses Taught: 

DRA100 Drawing 1
DRA200 Drawing 2
DRA300 Drawing 3
MFA Supervision

BA DipEd (LaTrobe), BA (Sydney), BA (Hons)(Sydney ), MFA (UNSW), PhD (Sydney)

Margaret Roberts works with expanded drawing and installation to focus on site-specificity and other relationships between artworks and their locations, exhibiting in Australia and overseas for over 30 years, with funded residencies at Dunedin, Perth, Yogyakarta, Paris, Rome and Berlin. The work is documented on www.margaretroberts.org Her 2009 PhD, Art and the Status of Place, and subsequent writing discuss artwork’s engagement with the meaning and value of place within Modern culture.  For 4 years, she was on the Board of Artspace, and for 10 years a founding co-director of Articulate project space, set up as an ARI to support spatial and experimental art practices. She has been a lecturer for over 20 years in Sculpture and Drawing and postgraduate supervision at Sydney College of the Arts and the National Art School.

Areas of specialty: Sculpture, Expanded drawing, Spatial and temporal art practices, Artist-run initiatives (ARIs).

Subjects and Courses Taught:

DRA100 Drawing 1
DRA200 Drawing 2
AHT232 Drawing
DRA300 Drawing 3
MFA Supervision

Cameron Ferguson specialises in drawing and watercolour, with over 15 years’ experience working and exhibiting in Sydney. He has taught drawing for a range of institutions, including TAFE, community colleges, high schools and, recently, the National Art School. Cameron has completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the National Art School, a Graduate Diploma in Education at the University of Technology, Sydney, and in 2017 completed his Masters of Fine Art by Research at the National Art School. His work is situated within the still life genre and object-based art, involving creating a series of drawings and installations that form associations between objects, place and memory.

Emma Wise is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is grounded in the creation of site-responsive installations, indoor and outdoor. She believes in the power of an elegant resolution and has often used simple elements on a large scale to dramatic effect. Her work is frequently driven by strong views on socio-political issues, and she is particularly interested in the negotiation of territory, in barriers and borders, ownership and passage.

More recently, interactive and collaborative works incorporating conversation and collective mapping reflect her belief in the strength and importance of community. Emma has worked as an oral historian and in film editing and her work can incorporate sound and/or video, often using the intimacy of direct voice, written and recorded, or found and edited.

Gary has been an artist for the past 40 years, and has a background in experimental filmmaking, photography, visual arts, music and sound art, and digital media production.

Gary has worked as a creative director and collaborator on a wide variety of cultural projects in museums, art galleries, visitor centres and botanic gardens across Australia and was twice involved in delivery of Australia’s representation at the Venice Biennale (2001 – Lyndal Jones, 2008 – Abundant (Architecture Biennale).

Gary has been teaching experimental drawing since 2018 at the National Art School and has developed and run workshops in autonomous drawing machines at NAS, as well as at the University of Technology Sydney and Monash University’s Sensilab.

Art Certificate (TAFE), BA Visual Arts ( CAI,SCAE), MFA (NAS)

Anthony Cahill’s practice is concerned with the relationship between the human and the natural world, often seen though an Absurdist viewpoint .

He has exhibited in commercial and public galleries nationally and internationally, since 2016 exhibiting every two years with Pollyxenia Joahnnou  in the Red Herring Project.

Armando has a Master of Art in Constructed Textiles from the Royal College of Art, London.

His artistic practice is founded in the act of drawing, and mark making, and the inter-relationships between gesture, surface and space. He has participated in significant group and solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally. He has lectured in Fashion and Textile Design at the University of Technology, Sydney, Kingston University and the London College of Fashion (UAL).

Tango’s work explores the nature of representation and how processes of artmaking can embody the perceptual experience. Firmly based in life drawing her interests lie in the embedded theatricality and absurdity of staged life and the everyday. Tango’s drawing practice expands on traditional life drawing methods to explore new depictions of staged bodies.

Tango graduated from the National Art School in 2016, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Sculpture). In her graduating undergraduate year she received the Academic Achievement Award and was awarded the John Olsen Figure Drawing Prize and the Jocelyn Maughan Sketchbook Prize. Going on to focus on drawing at NAS as a part of a graduate diploma she was awarded the Robert Le Gay Brereton Memorial Prize by the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Rachel Fairfax is a painter working in the mediums of drawing, painting and ceramics. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and an Honours Degree in Drawing from the National Art School. She is represented by Stella Downer Fine Art, Sydney, and Harvison Gallery, Perth, and in the past has been represented by Ray Hughes and Defiance galleries. Her exhibitions, residencies and community-based projects have taken her across Australia and overseas. Rachel has been awarded two Reg Richardson Scholarships and been a finalist in many Australian art awards. Named as one of Australia’s leading artists by the Sydney Morning Herald, Rachel exhibits widely and is represented in many public and private collections. Since 2003 she has taught drawing at the National Art School and other colleges of art.

Patrick Hartigan is a painter with a mind also for drawing and the moving image. His paintings, brushy renderings of classic genres (portraits, nudes, interiors, still lifes), pull childhood and familial nostalgia from the comforts of memory and push artist legacies around (a Picasso head, a Modigliani nude, various permutations of Brancusi) as fresh material. This core forms constellations in his exhibitions with imagery that is emotionally and formally more abstract and more sparing. Predominantly oil on found supports, his recent paintings demonstrate a sculptural mindfulness, incorporating dimensions of depth and time beyond the flat plane.

Annelies Jahn is an artist who works in the mediums of drawing, installation and painting. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Honours, and a Masters Degree in Painting from the National Art School. She has exhibited with Factory 49, .M Contemporary, Sydney Non Objective (SNO) and Stacks Projects in Sydney. Annelies was awarded .M Contemporary’s Bresic Whitney Emerging Artist Award for 2015. In 2013 she received the Coutts Family Award for Excellence in Drawing and was a finalist in the John Olsen Drawing Prize. In 2012 she received the FONAS Drawing Award and the Jocelyn Maughan Sketchbook Prize. Her work is represented in the National Art School Archive and private collections.

Kenneth Lambert’s experimental practice embraces disintegrated matter and the inexorable expressions that reflect the human condition. Lambert’s conceptual approach captures the contemporary zeitgeist by transposing themes found in science to illuminate current social issues and rising anxieties of our time. At the intersection of technology and the humanities, the artist’s investigations have led to works utilising particle acceleration to relate to climate change and data translation technology to investigate digital autonomy. Lambert’s cross-disciplinary practice encompasses digital, film, drawing, painting and installation.

With a professional background that encompasses museums, media design and filmmaking, Lambert draws on diverse skills to thread through his artistic practice. Since 2016 he has regularly exhibited in solo and group shows in Australia and the USA. In Australia, his work has been featured in the Mosman Art Prize, Churchie Emerging Artist Prize, The Alice Prize, Incinerator Gallery Prize – Art for Social Change, The Fisher’s Ghost Prize, and Kilgour Art Prize. In 2022, he is the first artist to complete a self-directed residency with Amnesty International in Australia and the dual grant recipient for the Australian Council for the Arts and Create NSW for his project ‘Stasis‘.

BA Visual Arts (CAI, SCAE), Grad. Dip. Prof. Art Studies, MFA (NAS)

Deborah Marks’s art practice encompasses painting, drawing and collage and involves figurative representations that deal with psychological issues. Her work concerns the conflicted nature of being in the world as internal/external processes.

She has been exhibiting over the past twenty five years in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia and more recently in Germany. In Sydney she has exhibited with Defiance Gallery, Charles Hewitt Gallery and Wagner Contemporary Gallery. In 2016 she held a solo exhibition of her paintings at the Kunstverein Murnau Gallery, Germany.

Her artwork has been collected by private and public institutions including the prestigious Kedumba Drawing Award Collection. Her work has been selected as finalist in numerous competitions including the Portia Geach Memorial Award, the Blake Prize, the Mosman Art Prize, the Ravenswood Art Prize and the Korean/Australian Art Prize.

Since 1999 Deborah has been a sessional lecturer at the drawing department at the National Art School. As well Deborah also teaches in the school’s external programs including the HSC Life Drawing Workshops, the Dobell School as well as Summer and Winter Workshops as part of the Public Programs.

Deborah Marks was awarded a BA in Visual Arts majoring in painting from City Art Institute, Sydney, Australia in 1985. In 1987 she gained a Post Graduate Diploma in Professional Art Studies. In 2011 she was awarded a Masters in Fine Art from the National Art School, Sydney, Australia. In 2007 Deborah was awarded the Cite International des Arts Paris studio residency.

Stephanie is a Sydney-based artist who has exhibited for over twenty years, with eleven solo exhibitions and over eighty group exhibitions across commercial galleries and artist run spaces, art fairs, university galleries, regional galleries and art museums. Stephanie specialises in oil painting, watercolour and drawing. Stephanie has been a finalist in a number of prize exhibitions including: the Archibald Prize, the Wynne Prize, the Sir John Sulman Prize, the Mosman Art Prize, the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship.

Stephanie has been a visual arts lecturer for over fifteen years – primarily teaching painting and drawing. This has included teaching students up to MFA level. Stephanie graduated from UNSW Art and Design in 2002 with a Master of Fine Arts.

Catherine O’Donnell’s practice is about the beauty of the uncelebrated and ordinary.

Her drawings are an exploration of the architecture, culture and history in the everyday-ness of the urban environment. She sees the suburbs as full of connection and disconnection, sameness and difference; in short, my drawings examine suburban living as a site of complexity. She is  particularly interested in the way that the vernacular architecture and general street scapes of the places we regularly inhabit become recessed into our minds like wallpaper – they are at once visible and invisible.

Born in Japan and trained as a graphic design in the United States, Toshiko had a long design career in the States, Holland, Indonesia, Singapore and New Zealand before coming to Sydney in 2001. In Sydney she changed her direction and studied fine art, obtaining two masters degrees and a PhD from the University of New South Wales while developing her art practice.

Having lived in many countries and criss-crossed the fine and applied arts fields, she has a special interest in cultural interactions in visual arts. In her own art practice, she draws inspirations equally from the outback of Australia and the ancient pilgrimage trails of Japan, science, philosophy and poetry. She exhibits regularly, and has won prizes and grants including the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize and a residency in Paris. Currently Toshiko divides her time between her art practice and teaching at the UNSW Art and Design.

Evan received a Diploma from the National Art School in 1991. He completed a Master of Fine Art (Research) at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW in 2002. Evan worked as a studio assistant for the sculptor Robert Klippel between 1996 and 1998. He taught painting and drawing to Diploma students at various TAFE colleges between 2002 and 2016. He currently teaches observational drawing at the National Art School. Evan is represented by Watters Gallery and has held 26 solo exhibitions since 1993. He has also been included in many group exhibitions. Evan was selected as a finalist for the Sulman Prize in 2006 at the Art Gallery of NSW. He was winner of the NSW Parliament Plein Air Painting Prize in 2015. His work is held in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, NSW Parliament, University of Technology Sydney, Art Bank and Wollongong Art Gallery.

Margaret Seymour is interested in a broad range of contemporary media and art practice. Inspired by new methods and materials for art making, she combines digital processes with more established techniques to explore the temporal and spatial displacements we experience living in an electronically connected world. Her artworks have been included in exhibitions with a variety of themes including new documentary art practices, place and image, navigating public/private space and solar powered art. In 2005 and 2015 she was awarded residencies at the Banff Art Centre and her work Pas de Deux won the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize 2011.

A committed and enthusiastic educator, Margaret has over fifteen years of experience teaching undergraduate and higher degree research candidates.

Luke graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Newcastle. He has an extensive exhibition history including recent exhibitions at Burra Regional Art Gallery, National Art School and Adelaide Central Gallery. He was a finalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize 2019 and has lectured in the Drawing Department at Adelaide Central School of Art. Luke’s studio practice reappropriates cultural signifiers used in the construction and deconstruction of identity.

Luke has a significant experience in programming and teaching, having developed and delivered workshops, professional development seminars and masterclasses for Newcastle Art Gallery, the NSW Department of Education and Training, Art Gallery of South Australia, and here at the National Art School.

Noel Thurgate is an artist with over 25 years’ experience in teaching drawing, including nine years as Head of Drawing at the National Art School. His work draws inspiration from the figure and the landscape, and his outdoor and studio drawings explore and develop the underlying abstract qualities found in nature. Exhibiting since 1975 in shows ranging from the Young Contemporaries, the Archibald Prize and the Kedumba Drawing Prize to numerous solo exhibitions, Noel has work exhibited in state, regional and institutional collections.

John is a Sydney based multi-disciplinary artist working across mediums with a focus on drawing. The work takes a question – response approach to what may be misunderstood through to what can be found when applying the notion of ‘drawing is thinking and feeling’ through to the act of making  and consolidating in major works.

After completing his BFA at NAS in 1999 John was an artist in residence at the Museum of  Archaeology in Valletta Malta in 2000/2001 He has had several solo shows in Sydney and continues to explore how drawing moves between  major works.

John has been the Drawing Technician at NAS since 2000.

Osvaldo is a Puerto Rican artist working internationally, now living and working in Australia. He graduated from Maryland Institute College of Arts (MICA), Maryland, USA, in 2008 with a Masters of Fine Arts majoring in painting under Professor Grace Hartigan. Osvaldo has exhibited his work in Australia and abroad and it is held in both private and public collections such as the De La Cruz Collection (Miami), Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico), Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico), Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach, CA), NSU Art Museum (Fort Lauderdale, FL), M.E. Collectors Room Museum (Berlin, Germany), and Luciano Benetton Collection (Rome, Italy), Umweltbundesamt (Environmental Protection Agency of Germany). Over the past 20 years Osvaldo has taught drawing and painting in teaching and lecturing positions in universities, and art schools at both graduate and undergraduate levels, including Maryland Institute College of Arts (MICA), National Art School of Puerto Rico (Escuelas de Artes Plásticas), at P.I. Art Center NY and N.J., USA. Osvaldo is a fellow of the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study, Germany.

Polly (Pollyxenia Joannou), a Sydney-born artist, holds an MA in Communication Design from Central Saint Martins, UK, and a BA in Visual Arts from UNSW, Australia. She’s acclaimed for works showcased in collections like The Art Gallery of NSW and Artbank Australia.

Polly’s accolades include The Redland Art Prize and The NSW Travelling Art Scholarship. Residencies at renowned institutions include The Arthur Boyd Residency in Italy and The Moya Dyring Residency in Paris. She’s also been hosted by DRAWinternational in France and WASPS Studios in the UK.

Polly’s art adorns private collections globally, spanning Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Europe, and the UK.