Monday 27 July 2020

India Mark’s exquisite still life paintings prove that small can be beautiful, and that paintings of simple domestic items can portray a calm majesty that is not often found in larger works. She describes the work as a response to Morandi’s devotion to still life painting, and says it represents the death of small moments of pleasure in our day-to-day lives. A recent graduate of the National Art…

Tuesday 14 July 2020

Justine Roche’s work explores early photographic processes such as the wet collodion process or ‘tintype’ photography. She is drawn to this medium for its unpredictability and timeless aesthetic. Here / Now (2019) comprises 65 portraits of female art students who graduated from the National Art School in 2019. Each image is directly exposed onto a metal plate and Roche’s sitters must hold a stil…

Sunday 12 July 2020

Guy Maestri graduated from the National Art School with a BFA, Hons (painting) in 2003. In 2016, he made his first painted bronze works in a series called xerox and the sculptures Maestri donated to NAS, Innocent X and Gould (2017), are from this series. The artist has said that he wanted the works to mirror the material values of the 21st century. It looks like the sculptures are made from an im…

Sunday 12 July 2020

The model in this painting is believed to be Rita Lee, a popular artists’ model who worked at the National Art School in the 1930s and 40s. Lee was also a model for Norman Lindsay, Max Dupain, Rah Fizelle and Ralph Balson, and later married NAS photography teacher George Young, and so had a long association with the art school. The student who painted her was Freda Robertshaw (1916-1997), who ca…

Wednesday 08 July 2020

Les Blakebrough (b. 1930) is one of Australia’s most respected ceramic artists. He is best known for the type of translucent porcelain he developed called ‘Southern Ice’ porcelain. Fired at 1300 degrees Celsius, this material has the ‘whiteness of snow and a translucence of ice’. It is now used by ceramicists worldwide and features in the practice of another NAS alumni, Juz Kitson. Blakebrough’s…