Southern Highlands Printmakers : CONTINUUM

CONTINUUM

SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS PRINTMAKERS

CONTINUUM An exhibition of contemporary prints responding to artists from previous generations who have had some connection with the Southern Tablelands region between Sydney and Canberra

goulburn.art

REGIONAL GALLERY

17 NOVEMBER – 13 DECEMBER 2017

GRIFFITH REGIONAL ART GALLERY 13 JULY – 11 AUGUST 2019

FOREWORD The Southern Highlands Printmakers (SHP) was established almost a quarter of a century ago in 1993. And unsurprisingly has a large reach, given the growing population of artists living in the region from the Southern Highlands of NSW, encompassing the Goulburn and Braidwood districts southward, down to the Illawarra foothills to the east and extending north to Picton.

Since inception the group has exhibited regularly with the centrally located Goulburn Regional Art Gallery. Firstly in Scratch, Burn and Burnish (2000) followed by Pushing Boundaries (2006), then Vario (2011) an international print exchange with print groups in Queensland, Wales and Hawaii. That portfolio of prints was exhibited at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery as well as in the UK and Hawaii. Full sets are in the collections of the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, the National Museum of Wales and Rockhampton Regional Gallery in Queensland.

In addition to SHP group exhibitions, present and past members have exhibited individually or in group shows at the Goulburn Regional Art Gallery. In 2013, Fair Trade, featured collaborative work by Marianne Courtenay and Kathy Orton, ex - TAFE Arts and Media teachers from TAFE Goulburn and Moss Vale campuses. Over the past nine years Robyn Kinsela, Tony Ameneiro, Britta Stenmanns, Lynne Flemons, Fran Ifould, Liz Jeneid, Betty Bray and the greatly missed Judy Benjamin to name a few, have been in shows at the gallery.

With such a long association between artists and Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, I welcomed the proposal of Continuum in 2015 by then Southern Highland printmaker Peter Ward who did much of the groundwork for this exhibition’s theme: ‘An exhibition of contemporary prints responding to artists from previous generations who have had some connection with the Southern Tablelands region between Sydney and Canberra.’

The diversity and skill of artists in this exhibition, both past and present is confirmation that this very special part of Australia has a long history of providing accomplished artists with inspiration and nourishment to want to visit or live here permanently.

Jane Cush Artistic Director Canberra Glassworks former Director Goulburn Regional Art Gallery (2008 - 2017)

INTRODUCTION The Southern Tablelands between Sydney and Canberra has always attracted artists. Arthur Streeton visited and painted the view from the top of Mount Gibraltar between Mittagong and Bowral; Fred William’s time painting on the Nattai River west of Mittagong was a turning point in his career; Brett Whiteley created two of his most lyrical landscapes at Marulan near Goulburn while more recently, Rosalie Gascoigne explored Lake George and its surrounds at the Canberra end of the region, gathering materials and inspiration for her assemblages and installations.

Other artists, such as Roy de Maistre and Sydney Long were born in the area; painter and printmaker Thea Proctor and photographer David Moore both went to school in the Southern Highlands and internationally renowned potter Gwyn Hanssen Pigott started her career training at the Sturt Pottery in Mittagong.

Consequently basing an exhibition of prints by Southern Highlands Printmakers that were inspired by these artists from past generations was an exciting proposition. It was a way of exploring the on-going connections between the past and the present, and of building a better understanding of the creative legacies passed on from one generation to another. What we had not expected was the number of networks we found linking so many artists to the region. Limiting ourselves to artists now deceased we ended up nonetheless with a list of more than 30 names of whom 25 have been chosen as the starting points for the print-works in Continuum.

The artists include painters, printmakers, three sculptors, an assemblage artist, a potter and three photographers and range from pre-colonial times to the 1990s and into the first decade of this century.

The brief for members was loose: to create a print inspired by some aspect of the life or work of the chosen artist. Some members have responded with work that is inspired by the broad body of their chosen artist’s work; some have focused on a particular technique or subject matter used by the artist; some have re-interpreted a specific work or a detail from a work and made it their own; while others have addressed an aspect of their chosen artist’s life or career.

The result is an exhibition of prints that are as diverse as the work of the artists who inspired them.

Marianne Courtenay 2017 Exhibition Coordinator Southern Highlands Printmakers

Tony Ameneiro

Fred Williams (1927 – 1982)

Linda Bottari

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott (1935 – 2013)

Tony Deigan

Tom Bass (1916 – 2010)

Lynne Flemons

Joseph Lycett (1774 – 1825)

Alan Purdom

Ralph Balson (1890 – 1964)

Hannah Quinlivan

Grace Cossington Smith (1892 – 1984)

Patricia Jones

Louisa Atkinson (1834 – 1872)

Elizabeth Atkin

Arthur Streeton (1867 – 1943)

Dorothy Freeman

Sydney Long (1871 – 1955)

Sheila Lyne

Joyce Allen (1916 – 1992)

Kathie Atkinson

Lloyd Rees (1895 – 1988)

Marianne Courtenay

Rosalie Gascoigne (1917 – 1999)

Margaret Fegent

Elioth Gruner (1882 – 1939)

John Hart

Grace Crowley (1890 – 1979)

Slavica Zivkovic

Jean Appleton (1911 – 2003)

Liz Jeneid

Thea Proctor (1879 – 1966)

Phoebe Middleton

Gundungurra cloak (pre-colonial)

Britta Stenmanns

Bert Flugelman (1923 – 2013)

Fran Ifould

Christoph Altenburg (1937 – 2008)

Gillian Baldock

Harold Cazneaux (1878 – 1953)

Lisa Brack

Brett Whiteley (1939 – 1992)

Sandra Shrubb

Frank Hurley (1885 – 1962)

Basil Hall

David Moore (1927 – 2003)

Lucia Parrella

Arthur Boyd (1920 – 1999)

Betty Bray

Roy de Maistre (1894 – 1968)

CONTINUUM The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them.

(Edgar Degas)

A quick internet search gives a definition of the word ‘continuum’, one that provides the sort of generous latitude required in this exhibition, as ‘a continuous system or range in which adjacent elements do not vary from each other in any marked degree although the endpoints of the system may be drastically different i.’

The starting point and range or system around which this exhibition is based is the art of printmaking and a group of printmakers who gather under the name the Southern Highlands Printmakers – a geographic node – from which they spread south to Goulburn and Braidwood, east to the Illawarra escarpment and north to the edge of the greater Sydney basin. The scope of print methodologies used by the individual artists is broad, embracing the definition’s ‘continuous system or range’ while the interpretative spirit with which the printmakers have approached their subjects explores the points of difference.

Artistic practice itself is part of a great cultural continuum. The printmakers’ selection of previous artistic ‘giants’ with associations to the greater Southern Highlands region, stretches from pre-British settlement times, through the colonial period to a young Arthur Streeton’s visit in 1892, on to early and mid century modernism and through to the end of the 20th Century with Rosalie Gascoigne’s links with Lake George. Emerging out of this group and their engaged respondents are myriad relationships, networks and journeys.

Geographically, the area covered moves in an arc from Colo Vale nearing the top of the Great Dividing Range, through Mittagong, Bowral and Moss Vale dropping down to the granite tablelands of Marulan, Goulburn and then east to Braidwood on the Clyde escarpment. From Moss Vale, it tracks through Kangaloon, to Robertson and the Illawarra escarpment. Journeying – literally and symbolically - across time, geography and within networks and relationships, is the pulsing thread of the continuum that is the underpinning theme of this printmaking project.

Let’s begin our journey on the escarpment near present day Robertson, overlooking the Illawarra plain, just before the opening up of the Southern Highlands to white settlers. Phoebe Middleton’s unfolding elegant linocut, Nellie’s Possum Skin Cloak, is dedicated to the indigenous women of the Gundungurra people.

Nellie’s Glen – now a well-known picnic spot – and the nearby Barren Grounds were important indigenous ceremonial places.

They were on the trade routes from the coast to the highlands for a number of local tribes.

Middleton’s work emulates the designs on the skin side of the cloaks detailing an individual’s narrative of country and kinship.

However, her linocut, while elegantly inscribing symbols for waterholes, women’s gathering places, animal totems and food sources, also includes barbed wire notations slashed across the unfolding story. The restrictions placed on indigenous use of the land broke the continuum of this thousands year old narrative.

Lynne Flemons’ interest in Weereewa/Lake George led her to the convict artist Joseph Lycett and his idyllic picture-postcard scene View of Lake George, New South Wales from the North East, a hand coloured aquatint and etching in a suite published in London in 1825. Lycett was commissioned by Governor Macquarie in 1820 to produce views of the colony, however there is no evidence that he visited the Lake George area and may have based his work on the drawings of either George Evans or James Taylor, both of whom accompanied the Governor on an expedition to the region in the same year.ii Lycett’s park-like view – he placed a British gentleman in the foreground – belies the fact that this environment was inscribed by its own granite geology and indigenous fire-stick management.

Unlike Lycett’s absenteeism and idealisation, Flemons’ feel for the area and her printmaking are both deeply embedded in her experience of walking around the lake and its foreshores: a

repetitive gesture, itself a kind of continuum, that attunes one to nuances and shifts. Keeping a similar north-east focus to Lycett, Flemons has kept a high horizon line, outlined in the stencilled mountain range and hinted shoreline, with the monoprint impression of the lake and reflected clouds firmly in the centre.

Overlaid is her woodblock mapping: a network, or loose grid, of journeys over time.

Maintaining the historical chronology, we turn to Australia’s first colonial female artist, Louisa Atkinson, who was born at Sutton Forest near Bowral. Although she spent much of her life in Kurrajong Heights, she returned to the Southern Highlands and married a botanist who had accompanied the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. She was respected as a good writer and botanical collector; her talents as an artist, her deep curiosity and her attention to detail being acknowledged by the Director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens who named several plant species after her. Patricia Jones’ response to Atkinson’s sketchbooks of specimens departs from indigenous species. Her etching Canna Lilies is of an introduced tropical species that has adapted to the temperate climate and rich soils of the highlands.

Mapping and grids as themes, elucidated in Lynne Flemons’ Mapping Weereewa, are taken further by Marianne Courtenay and her interpretative response to Rosalie Gascoigne’s gridded, poetic assemblage works inspired by Gascoigne’s fascination with the country around Lake George: Pale Landscape 1977, Feathered Fence 1979, Lake 1991 and Suddenly the Lake 1995.

Gascoigne loved the sudden appearance of the horizon line and the reveal of the lake as you crest the hill; a breath-taking vista before descending to the close details of the lake - the water line, swan feathers caught in fencing wire, grasses beaten down by rain. Courtenay’s work is immersive; she walks us through the surrounding fields covered in native kangaroo grass and down to the lake’s edge. Ancient Harvest offers a close observation of the lake environs; of food sources and land use by the indigenous people of this area. Overlaid with the wood-blocked grass motif, the gridded, hand dyed papers evoke the sweep of the fields and the muddy water’s edge, while the assembled gridded panels allude to the rustling movement of wind through grasses.

The grid is an important element in Alan Purdom’s work.

Purdom has used it as a structural device in his homage to the non-objective modernist painter Ralph Balson. The ground of his triptych was built up with blue underpainting, followed by the application of square sponged-on blocks in umber tones that form the grid armature. His stencilled colour marks, derived from Balson’s palette in his painting No.9 1959 create a sense of movement, like the expanding universe, against the formal repetitive structure of the grid.

After his retirement in 1922 Ralph Balson moved into a converted garage/studio on his friend and supporter Grace Crowley’s property in Mittagong; a period when he explored looser, gestural mark-making, the apogee of the formal structure of his earlier abstract painting. Balson once remarked that he and Crowley were Australia’s ‘most extinguished artists’.iii John Hart’s lithographic drawing - based upon a 1928 photographic portrait of a young, forthright Grace Crowley taken in Paris and now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales – pays homage to her early richly textured graphite portrait sketches. Crowley once described her time in Paris under the tutelage of abstractionist André Lhote as her happiest years.

Elioth Gruner, an inter-war modernist, landscape painter, winner of several Wynne Prizes and another under-recognised artist, is represented by Margaret Fegent in a linocut portrait; the contrast between the dark shadow and dramatic lighting of the mask-like lower half of the face is a psychological metaphor for the disparity between his public recognition at the time as the ‘laureate of the landscape’ contrasted with his frequent bouts of depression, followed, in death, by relative obscurity.

Within the group of selected artists there is a significant cohort of Australian ‘giants’, recognised for their revelatory approaches to portraying the variety and experience of Australian landscapes both urban and rural; from a young Arthur Streeton, to Grace Cossington Smith, Lloyd Rees, Arthur Boyd, Brett Whiteley and Fred Williams: a veritable roll call in Australian art history.

Extending the reach of portraiture to trees, printmakers Kathie Atkinson and Hannah Quinlivan have taken works by

Lloyd Rees and Grace Cossington Smith respectively as their inspiration.

In 1978 Lloyd Rees worked with master printer Max Miller in Kangaloon near Robertson on an etching series entitled Tribute to Sydney. One of Rees’s favourite motifs was the majestic sinuous Port Jackson fig. His love of the form of these native trees is evident in his detailed graphite drawings and studies of figs in and around Sydney Harbour. Atkinson has sought to emulate the textural quality of his drawing in her use of a technique known as waterless lithography. She has captured the sinuous line of the trunk, roots and branches, the evaporated toner texture uncannily mirroring the encrusted bark surfaces.

Hannah Quinlivan’s work responds to an early painting by Grace Cossington Smith, Sunny Morning: Cows at Lanyon 1916.

Grace and her older sister Mabel, who was being courted by a young English officer at Duntroon, would regularly visit their school friend Mary Cunningham at the Cunningham’s property Lanyon, on the outskirts of the area designated as Canberra. Cossington Smith’s association with the Southern Highlands was extended when her younger brother married into the Yarwood family of Exeter. From the late 1930s and through the 1940s, she visited and recorded in drawings and paintings the landscape around Moss Vale and Exeter.

Canberra-based Quinlivan has sought equivalences between her response to the unacknowledged tree in Cossington Smith’s painting and to Lanyon’s proximity to her own Canberra studio and the shared vision of a stag (dead tree) fore-grounded in the painting and one outside her studio window. She has created an activated, poetic response: a skeletal portrait of frailty in a wire drawing that is also a wall sculpture - with a linocut on paper wrapped around a wire armature - emulating the traces of the growth rings of a once majestic trunk.

Following the purchase of his work, Still Glides the Stream, and Shall for ever Glide in 1890 by the Art Gallery of New South Wales – the first state gallery to purchase a contemporary painting by an Australian artist – 22 years old Arthur Streeton made several trips to Sydney, establishing a base at Sirius Cove and branching out to the Blue Mountains, the Southern Highlands and the

Hawkesbury. The 1892 painting, The Vale of Mittagong (in the National Gallery of Victoria collection), a watercolour on paper, was painted from a high vantage point on Mt Gibraltar. Whereas Still Glides the Stream… maps the meandering terrain of the river, The Vale of Mittagong is a record of settlement, mapping instead the road networks connecting farmlets and evidence of land clearing. Taking this as her inspiration, Elizabeth Atkin has continued the use of the high vantage point in her drypoint work, South from Moonbi Lookout, and in her use of watercolour washes references the glorious golds and blues of late afternoon light that appear in Streeton’s Golden Summer, Eaglemont 1889.

Tony Ameneiro’s monotype suite, Nattai River Landscape with Rocks (The Crags), captures the viscous quality and immediacy of a still-wet gouache painted en plein air by Fred Williams.

Williams, like Streeton before him, is often credited with enabling Australians to see the land differently. Williams’ stay with the Stevens on their property near Mittagong was at a time of artistic crisis for him. However the resultant works, plein air gouaches to be worked up into oil paintings and etchings, signified a major breakthrough in his focus on the Australian landscape as his primary motif. Ameneiro has focussed on the fore-grounded riverbank boulders in Williams’ finished work, The Nattai River 1958. Williams’ work owed a debt to Cezanne; Ameneiro’s homage continues this lineage, and through his painterly mastery of monotype makes it his own.

Taking this journey further down the Hume Highway, Brett Whiteley spent time around Marulan in the mid 1970s. Whiteley’s painting Lyrebird 1972-3, set on a vivid orange background with a dancing bird perched on a mound of earth, incorporates collaged fabric and actual lyrebird plumage. Lisa Brack has taken this Whiteley image and its celebration of the beauty of birds in their environment and incorporated a red ochre-like collagraph background overlaid with a wood-block lyrebird image with embossed feathers - a nod to Whiteley’s lyrebird feathers.

Goulburn born symbolist and leading Art Nouveau painter Sidney Long incorporated the god Pan into his mythical, poetic Australian landscapes, which he peopled with nymphs and satyrs. He was a notable printmaker and was president of the Australian Painter-Etchers’ Society from 1924 to 1931. Dorothy Freeman’s

digital print - a poem to pan surrounded by images of the god and Australian flora and fauna, plays to the spirit of Long’s work.

Myth and memory is the thread that segues through a number of relationships in the exhibition. Lucia Parrella’s triptych After the Fall is redolent with references to Arthur Boyd’s frequent use of biblical and classical mythological figures throughout his oeuvre. Even his exuberant Boat Builders, Eden 1948 draws directly from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. However, Parrella’s ‘fall’ draws on an Indonesian myth and a collaboration between Boyd and printmaker Indra Deigan resulting in an editioned hand-made book and a series of collagraphs as individual prints.

Printmakers Britta Stenmanns, Tony Deigan and Fran Ifould have focussed on metal-working past masters for their inspiration.

Stenmanns’ choice of sculptor Bert Flugelman animates the mythical Icarus reference above, as his German surname translates as ‘man with wings’ or ‘wingman’. Flugelman who was Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Arts and later Fellow of the University of Wollongong lived near Robertson and in his later retirement at Burradoo. His stainless steel sculpture Winged Figure – Lawrence Hargrave Memorial was commissioned in 1988 and sits at the base of Mount Keira, where hang gliders launch over the escarpment. Stenmanns’ Icarus’s Paradox - relief printed onto mild rusted steel – alludes to Flugelman’s name and the material he used.

However, she allows ‘wingman’ to take flight, literally: what is left on the wall is the negative relief; one is left to imagine the ascent.

Tony Deigan selected sculptor Tom Bass based upon their common childhood memories of the alchemy of watching blacksmiths assembling and repairing the metal armatures of wagon wheels.

Deigan’s relief printing onto copper pays homage to Bass’s use of the metal in some of his monumental sculptural relief commissions such as those for the National Library of Australia and the Menzies Library at the Australian National University. Deigan has gone one step further and taken his print off the wall and onto the floor - an installation in the spirit of Bass’s sculpture.

Fran Ifould has taken silversmith Christoph Altenburg as her inspiration. Son of an Austrian Hapsburg archduke, Altenburg

whose property backed onto the Shoalhaven River near Braidwood, was one of the founders of the Braidwood-based annual Iron Corroboree. In her work Ifould has alluded to Altenburg’s Austrian heritage in the use of the acanthus motif much used in Austrian Baroque architecture - employing ochre and red-hot metal colours to signify both the colours of his new country and his love of metalwork, repeated as her artist’s book unfurls down the wall.

Three of Australia’s important modernist photographers have also provided inspiration.

Like a character straight out of Boy’s Own Magazine, Frank Hurley was an adventurer, great documentary maker, early cinematographer and later, war photojournalist. He makes the criteria for inclusion in the exhibition by the skin of his teeth: a two-hour train journey from Sydney to Mittagong in which the callow young Hurley managed to convince Sir Douglas Mawson that he was the man to document Mawson’s Antarctic expedition in 1911. Taking Hurley’s ‘whatever it takes’ attitude, photographer and printmaker Sandra Shrubb has pushed the boundaries of print technology to produce Boy’s Own Adventure, a tongue-in-cheek work printed on stone.

Editioning printmaker Basil Hall, an artist in his own right, has chosen to work with one of the iconic images from the 1960s; David Moore’s Migrants Arriving in Sydney 1966. Moore was schooled at Tudor House in Moss Vale in the 1940s. Hall has taken his title Boundless Plains from the national anthem and given it a strong ironic twist. Whereas Moore’s photograph captures the hopes, however tremulous, on the faces of the post World War Two migrants, Hall’s etching instead captures the fear and rejection on the faces of the boat people, marked out with orange life jackets. Raked across the screen is the tell tale barrier of barbed wire functioning, as in Phoebe Middleton’s print Nellie’s Possum Skin Cloak, to denote exclusion and rejection.

Pictorialist photographer Harold Cazneaux was invited by Winifred West, the principal of Frensham School in Mittagong, to produce photographs for a glossy school publication produced

by Art in Australia magazine under the direction of Sydney Ure

Smith, publisher also of The Home, a monthly women’s magazine which introduced Australian women to international modernism.

Gillian Baldock’s print draws on an iconic cover by Cazneaux for The Home; a photograph of British artist and theatre designer Doris Zinkeisen with flapper cloche and elegant sculptured profile.

Baldock’s choice also alludes to Winifred West’s promotion of the education of young ladies: the purpose of the Cazneaux commission and elegant coffee table book.

A contemporary of Harold Cazneaux, Thea Proctor spent her teenage years in Bowral. A modernist designer, printmaker and painter, she was close to Sydney Ure Smith and his publications Art in Australia and The Home producing some outstanding covers and artwork for both magazines. From 1926, she was also associated with the Sydney-based Contemporary Group of artists that included Grace Cossington Smith and Roy de Maistre.

Liz Jeneid has taken Proctor’s graphic woodblock designs and interest in modernist interior design as inspiration for her work of linocut prints using Australian floral motifs arranged as a concertina book with a Japanese screen-like aesthetic.

Thea Proctor is the continuing thread between artists Jean Appleton, a friend of Proctor’s who was also friends with Lloyd Rees and Grace Cossington Smith, and Joyce Allen who had been a student of Proctor’s in the 1950s; Appleton and Allen both retired to the Southern Highlands.

inspired by Southern Highlands born expatriate artist Roy de Maistre’s colour theory, harmonising links between colours and musical notes. Using high-key colour, de Maistre painted Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor (now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection) in 1919, one of the earliest purely abstract artworks painted in Australia. Bray’s linocut suite, using three vibrant colour blocks, echoes the exuberance of de Maistre’s early work and is anchored in place through the inscribed landscape motifs of the highlands.

Linda Bottari’s focus is on the internationally recognised ceramist, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott and the light effects of her glazes. Hanssen Pigott’s love of Giorgio Morandi’s still life arrangements of household objects – jugs, bowls, vases – and his muted palette is well known and is expressed in her aesthetically restrained sets of objects with translucent glazes ranging from celadon to pale ochre. In her simple elliptical form Bottari has managed to capture both the chromatic range of the potter’s palette and the glowing translucency of the glazes through her manipulation of the inks on the textured collagraph plates. The equivalence between Hanssen Pigott’s aesthetic and Bottari’s print is beautifully resolved.

The twenty-five artists in this exhibition have exemplified in surprising ways Degas’ dictum: ‘The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them.’ And in doing so, they have enlivened a cultural continuum historically, geographically and personally.

Printmaker Slavica Zivkovic knew Appleton in her later years in Moss Vale. Like many women artists, Appleton had to overcome resistance to her wish to be a professional artist. She was a muchloved teacher. Zivkovic’s collaged screenprint on wood, Joy in the Unknowningness gestures towards Appleton ‘carving out’ her artistic journey.

Joyce Allen, known for her well-crafted, witty etchings and linocuts, many of which are in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection, was instrumental in teaching printmaking at the Berrima District Art Society. Sheila Lyne’s homage to Allen goes one step further; her etching, Sunflowers was printed using Allen’s 1862 printing press.

Colour, both exuberant and restrained, is the thread in the final two sets of relationships. Artist and printmaker Betty Bray was

Dr Anne Sanders 2017

i

‘Continuum’: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/continuum.

Accessed 5 May 2017

ii

Jeanette Hoorn, Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape, Fremantle Press, 2007, p 57

iii

Cited in Elena Taylor, Grace Crowley: being modern, NGA, 2006, footnote 18.

TONY AMENEIRO / FRED WILLIAMS (1927 – 1982)

My monotype prints in this exhibition are a response to some visits I made to ‘The Crags’ and to the Nattai River area where Fred Williams had worked. I was interested in creating a response to some of the landscape, deliberately utilizing the immediacy of monotype, something not far from Williams’ own approach.

Nattai River Landscape with Rocks (The Crags) 2 monotype 38 x 50cm 2017

My prints for this exhibition are an attempt to capture the feeling for line, light and shade and the simplicity of form in Gwyn Hanssen Pigott’s work. As she would say, ’to work to the essence’.

In Gwyn’s Bowls I have used a collagraph technique because it naturally creates a softness of image. In making the plates I used a variety of textures, some glued to the surface of the plate, some applied with a brush and some cut into the surface of the matrix.

Gwyn’s Bowls collagraph 30 x 30cm 2017

LINDA BOTTARI / GWYN HANSSEN PIGOTT (1935 – 2013)

TONY DEIGAN / TOM BASS (1916 – 2010)

As children Tom Bass and I were both influenced by seeing a wooden wheel being assembled. A blacksmith using fire and water pulled together hub, spokes and wooden rim with a contracting red-hot steel hoop, firming the entire construction together in a cloud of hissing water vapour. I have chosen this experience as the starting point for this project. Copper and stone (ceramic) reflect the materials Bass favoured, while radiating spokes are a nod to the ‘Rising Sun’ insignia and his service in the Australian army.

Tom’s Wheel (detail) relief print on copper, ceramic, wood, metal 70 x 110 x 20cm 2017

In Mapping Weereewa, I have used monoprinting and stencils to look at the different cultural perspectives between Lycett’s time and his depiction of Weereewa (Lake George) and my own.

Lycett’s picturesque conventions reflect the landscape as something separate from him, and from the viewer. Whereas I aim to represent the lake as I have experienced it by walking on and around it. It is this history, infused with the ephemeral elements of cloud and shadow that I have drawn on to explore my own relationship with Weereewa.

Mapping Weereewa monoprint, woodblock, stencil 56 x 76cm 2017

LYNNE FLEMONS / JOSEPH LYCETT (1774 – 1825)

ALAN PURDOM / RALPH BALSON (1890 – 1964)

Much of my work is based on the grid. I thought this would be a good format to showcase Ralph Balson’s palette. I have formalized some of his gestural marks and overlaid them on a neutral background. Although his shapes were loose brush marks, I have made them sharper in appearance by stopping them when they reach a boundary.

Although the work appears as a triptych it is intended to be one unit. The three sections just serve to help the fractured appearance of the pattern.

959 (detail) stencil, relief on hardboard 172 x 90cm 2017

I’ve responded to a less well-known painting of Cossington Smith’s, Sunny Morning: Cows at Lanyon. This depicts a ‘stag tree’, a large dead tree standing in a paddock, and three cows resting beneath it.

Perhaps it resonates with me because of its unlikely form and its age and perhaps because of the place where the painting was made – just a few kilometres up the Murrumbidgee River from my studio.

My interest in these trees goes to their age: silent memorials to an earlier time prior to invasion. Selective Memory is my own response to a stag tree near my studio.

Selective Memory linocut, wire 115 x 60 x 12cm 2017

HANNAH QUINLIVAN / GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH (1892 – 1984)

PATRICIA JONES / LOUISA ATKINSON (1834 – 1872)

I had the privilege to view and study Louisa Atkinson’s drawings and watercolours at the State Library of NSW. Her folio is filled with intricate drawings of ferns, field studies of Australia’s plants that record their diversity and uniqueness and watercolour paintings of birds, insects and lizards.

My own work explores the impact of introduced plants on our native flora and fauna. Working from drawings and field studies, my linocuts and etchings are inspired by the work of Louisa Atkinson, one of colonial Australia’s firstborn artists.

Canna Lilies etching 20.5 x 29.5cm 2017

My prints are influenced by the tonal qualities, light and colour Streeton used to show the fleeting impressions of the Australian landscape at a single point in time. I have chosen high vantage points (as did Streeton on occasions) to capture the wide vistas and tonal passages created by distance, and chine-collĂŠ technique to capture the transparency of the light.

South from Moonbi Lookout drypoint, hand colour 25 x 47cm 2017

ELIZABETH ATKIN / ARTHUR STREETON (1867 – 1943)

DOROTHY FREEMAN / SYDNEY LONG (1871 – 1955) In my new work I have focused on the Greek god Pan, poetry and Australian Art Nouveau all hallmarks of the art of Sydney Long. My interest in Pan derives from my fascination with the concept of the parallel universe and the slippage that occurs between the real world of rational thought and the ideal world of creative imagination; also the way that Pan, ancient Spirit of Nature, appears to have crossed cultural boundaries and today has become more of a universal identity.

Pan and a Salmon Moon digital print 56 x 34cm 2017

SHEILA LYNE / JOYCE ALLEN (1916 – 1992) I began my printmaking journey using Joyce Allen’s Hopkinson and Cope Albion press made in 1862. I chose Joyce Allen in recognition of her foundation work in promoting prints and printmaking in Australia. As a printmaker I too relish that special moment when a first proof is pulled and the paper is lifted to reveal magic!

Sunflowers etching 33 x 25cm 2017

KATHIE ATKINSON / LLOYD REES (1895 – 1988) Inspired by Lloyd Rees’ detailed drawings of fig trees, I began with a waterless lithography technique of tonerwash on aluminium. The toner, a mix of carbon powder and water, was drizzled onto the plate; reticulated patterns formed as the water evaporated - perfect patterns for bark and rocks. Over several weeks the trees evolved and the image was finally fused to the plate with heat. The fragile result was then scanned, coloured in Photoshop and printed in a limited edition.

Thunderbolt’s Track pigment print 44.5 x 38cm 2016

MARIANNE COURTENAY / ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 – 1999) I have chosen to work with two compositional strategies that Rosalie Gascoigne often employed, a grid and the use of multiples and repetition. The subject of Ancient Harvest, Kangaroo Grass, was husbanded by Aboriginal peoples in pre-colonial times across the country that inspired much of Gascoigne’s work, ‘the waving dried grass paddocks’ of the Southern Tablelands. A number of her assemblages reference grasslands while some also incorporate gathered and dried grass in their construction.

Ancient Harvest (detail) woodcut, dyed paper, pencil 105 x 105cm 2017

MARGARET FEGENT / ELIOTH GRUNER (1882 – 1939) In Between Darkness and Light I have tried to highlight the contrast between the light in Gruner’s paintings and the darkness of his depression; between his great popularity in his life-time and then relative obscurity, until recently, in the decades following his death. The legacy of his mastery of light has been ‘hidden’ for too long.

Between Darkness and Light relief print 38 x 28.5cm 2017

JOHN HART / GRACE CROWLEY (1890 – 1979) While Grace Crowley is known for her exploration of abstraction, I have always been most inspired by her drawings - elegantly simple, confidently drawn, and quite beautiful. Many of her drawings are portraits of friends, and while I first thought to do something similar for this exhibition, in the end I settled on this small portrait of Crowley herself. I’ve always thought it a shame she is such an underrated artist, and this seemed an appropriate way to publicly acknowledge my indebtedness to her and her practice.

Crowley lithograph, screen print 28.5 x 19.5cm 2017

SLAVICA ZIVKOVIC / JEAN APPLETON (1911 – 2003) My works are a symbolic gesture to Jean Appleton’s journey abroad - her desire to discover the art world beyond her homeland and her persistence in seeking more than the restraints that were placed on her at the time. I knew Jean well and remember her passion in retelling the story of carving her journey into the unknown.

The other reference in my work is to Appleton’s Study of Woman 1942. Here, her head tilted to one side, the painter is fully immersed in her studio.

Joy in the Unknowingness screen print on wood 40 x 33cm 2017

I found Thea Proctor’s work with its strong graphic quality very interesting especially as seen in her lino cuts and wood cut prints. I have chosen to do a series of lino cut prints that I have made into a book, a concertina form that stands on the hinges which extend above and below the print.

Cast Shadows artist’s book - lino print 23 x 120cm (open) 2017

LIZ JENEID / THEA PROCTOR (1879 – 1966)

PHOEBE MIDDLETON / POSSUM SKIN CLOAKS OF THE GUNDUNGURRA (PRE-COLONIAL) My image incorporates two Dreamtime creatures that Aunty Wendy talked about. Mirrigan, the native quoll, who chased Gurrangatch, the eel, fish serpent, across Gundungurra lands forming caves and ravines, from Jenolan to the Nepean River and Wombeyan caves. We discussed symbols of stars, rain, waterholes and gatherings, which I also included in the image. Finally, she suggested the image should contain a lyrebird, the interpreter that speaks to all animals in all languages - a symbol of optimism - the peacemaker. Perfect.

Nellie’s Possum Skin Cloak (detail) linocut 120 x 39cm 2017

BRITTA STENMANNS / BERT FLUGELMAN (1923 – 2013) I have used rusted mild steel for my work Icarus’s Paradox and the negative cut-out of wings as a poetic allusion to Bert Flugelman’s surname, literally a ‘Man with Wings’. I then relied on a relief technique to print an interpretation of reflective surfaces that his stainless steel shapes bring to life when one moves around them, often similar to reflections seen on the surface of water.

Icarus’s Paradox relief print on rusted mild steel 130 x 50cm 2017

FRAN IFOULD / CHRISTOPH ALTENBURG (1937 – 2008) Christoph Altenburg’s passion for metal has been my inspiration for this work. Using the forge and red-hot metal tools, I have burnt pokerwork designs into woodblocks and then printed them in both relief and intaglio.

I used acanthus leaves, a prominent feature in Austrian Baroque architecture, to reference Altenburg’s Hapsburg heritage and set them against marks and textures suggestive of his adopted Australian homeland.

From Royalty to Riches (detail) artist’s book - woodblock, stencil 250 x 60cm 2017

GILLIAN BALDOCK / HAROLD CAZNEAUX (1878 – 1953) My works pay homage to the Art Nouveau style that impressed the young Cazneaux and aim to evoke an atmosphere of warmth and drama through use of colour, light and shade.

I have chosen to use a combination of relief printing techniques, lino and collagraph, using simplified images that suggest a narrative.

Social Graces collagraph, linocut 28.5 x 23.5cm 2016

LISA BRACK / BRETT WHITELEY (1939 – 1992)

I was inspired by Brett Whiteley’s response to the natural world as a sanctuary and an escape. In prints such as Mimicry, which references Whiteley’s Lyrebird 1972-73, and other studies of birds in the landscape, I have used multiple printmaking techniques (woodblock, collagraph, embossing and etching) to explore Whiteley’s use of sinuous line, strong colour and texture.

Mimicry woodcut, collagraph, embossing 22 x 26cm 2016

A far cry from glass plate negatives, lantern slides, 36 kilo cameras and stereographs used for his documentaries, I’d like to believe, if alive in this century, Frank Hurley would have embraced the technologies of iphones, computers and digital prints. So in this work I opted to use my iphone 5 camera to create images printed digitally on stone, exploring Hurley’s journey from Moss Vale, the journey that changed his life to adventurer and show-man.

Boy’s Own Adventure digital print on stone 46 x 42.5cm 2017

SANDRA SHRUBB / FRANK HURLEY (1885 – 1962)

BASIL HALL / DAVID MOORE (1927 – 2003)

Two of Moore’s statements concerning his ‘reaction against the “decisive moment” - a tiny slice of time trapped in the emulsion of a film’ and another referring to ‘the soft spread of time’ intrigued me. Migrants Arriving in Sydney 1966 is one of his most memorable images. As Australia’s leaders wrestle with the distinction between ‘illegal’ migrants and genuine refugees, his image and the print I have based on it illustrate changing attitudes over the last 50 years.

Boundless Plains (detail) mixed print media 90 x 60cm 2017

When I discovered Arthur Boyd’s collagraphs based on an Indonesian myth of a boy eaten by a volcano, I was immediately intrigued. Volcanoes have been a source of inspiration in my own graphic work for many years.

Throughout his career Boyd drew on a repertoire of mythological and hybrid figures, often imbued with a sense of foreboding. My triptych for this exhibition also reaches back to classical mythology, using human and animal forms to speak of metamorphosis, calamity and the precariousness of our life on earth.

After the Fall relief, drypoint 66 x 40cm 2017

LUCIA PARRELLA / ARTHUR BOYD (1920 – 1999)

BETTY BRAY / ROY DE MAISTRE (1894 – 1968)

I have focused on the years 1919/20 when de Maistre was living in Sydney. His work appeals to me for the way in which he captures the essence and rhythm of his chosen landscape. My print As Above so Below is inspired by the rhythm and vibrating colour he was using at that time and his philosophy that ‘colour is the song of life’ and that all things are interconnected.

The relief block was drawn in the landscape and carved in the studio.

As Above So Below linocut 30 x 30cm 2017

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES TONY AMENEIRO

FRED WILLIAMS / 1927 – 1982

Tony Ameneiro studied art at the Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education in Sydney from 1978 to 1981. He is an artist-printmaker, working within his drawing practice across the areas of etching, lithography, relief printmaking and monotype.

Fred Williams is regarded as one of Australia’s most important twentieth century landscape painters. And equally recognized for his printmaking.

Ameneiro began exhibiting professionally in 1981 and has shown his work regularly in both solo and group shows since. Ameneiro was the winner of the National 2007 Freemantle Print Award, and has been twice chosen by the Print Council of Australia as a commissioned print artist. A three time finalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize, Art Gallery of NSW (2003, 06 & 2012) he was represented in 2005 at the Biennale Jogja VIII in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He was also selected for inclusion in the 2014 International Print Biennale in the UK.

Born in Richmond, Victoria, Fred Williams studied at the National Gallery School in Melbourne during the 1940s. He travelled to the UK in 1951 where he studied and worked until 1957. On his return to Australia, Williams’ art practice appeared to stall. Sensing this, his friend, painter John Brack arranged for him to take a break staying with some mutual friends, John and Joan Stephens, on their property west of Mittagong in the Nattai River Valley. The four-week spell proved to be career changing.

He produced ‘twenty to thirty gouaches... to be transformed later into oil paintings... and etching plates for printing’i.

Ameneiro’s work has been collected by several major institutions including the British Museum, London ,UK, the National Gallery of Australia, The Art Gallery of NSW, Queensland Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of South Australia and the State Library of Victoria. He is also represented in various regional and private collections within Australia and overseas.

Some years ago Tony Ameneiro interviewed the late Joan Stephens. She spoke of how important that stay was for Williams, finding a renewed sense of purpose and a new interest in the gum tree during that time. The Stephens later moved across the Nattai to what is now ‘The Crags’. Fred Williams returned for other stays over the years, continuing to paint on these visits ‘but without the energy and absorption of his first visit in 1957’ii.

ELIZABETH ATKIN

ARTHUR STREETON / 1867 – 1943

Elizabeth Atkin has developed her art practice through studies in part-time art classes and intensive short courses and workshops, including a onemonth residential printmaking course in Venice and a two-week workshop in Greece. She has also completed qualifications in bookbinding through Ultimo TAFE, Sydney.

Born in Victoria, Arthur Streeton attended classes in drawing at the National Gallery of Victoria and began an apprenticeship as a lithographer. He was basically self-taught as a painter and was influenced by the French landscape and realist painters Corot and Millet as well as the early Impressionists.

In 2010 Atkin moved permanently to Balmoral in the Southern Highlands and set up a purpose built gallery and studio complex where she offers classes in printmaking and bookbinding. Since its inception White Waratah Workshops has participated in the Open Studio Art Trail of the Southern Highlands Arts Festival. She has also taught bookbinding at the Guild of Craft Bookbinders and printmaking at the Royal Art Society, Sydney. Atkin is currently working with collagraphs and drypoints incorporating colour through watercolour washes.

Atkin exhibits her work regularly in the Southern Highlands and further afield. She has won the print section of the North Sydney Art Prize. She has also exhibited her bookbinding work with Bookbinding Exhibitions Australia in a show that travelled to Paris and Japan. Her prints are represented in private collections in Australia, Ireland, the UK and France.

Streeton was one of the Melbourne-based Heidelberg group who painted en plein air. Their 9x5 Exhibition of 1889 comprised 180 small jewels of paintings that upset some establishment figures but inspired others.

In 1890 Streeton moved to Sydney where he painted around the city and harbour as well as in the adjacent Blue Mountains. In 1892 he visited the Southern Highlands and painted The Vale of Mittagong from the top of Mount Gibraltar.

Between 1897 and 1915 Streeton lived and exhibited in England with frequent trips back to Australia where his reputation continued to grow.

In World War 1 he became an official war artist with the Australian forces in France. Returning to Melbourne after the war, Streeton settled in the Dandenongs from where he continued to paint and exhibit.

KATHIE ATKINSON

LLOYD REES / 1895 – 1988

Kathie Atkinson’s long career as an internationally published wildlife photographer allowed her to indulge her passion for nature and the outdoors; while developing her powers of observation and the skills to capture the finest details in her subjects. She is the author of many children’s books about nature, including the award winning Life in a Rotten Log.

Lloyd Rees was one of the most important Australian landscape artists of the twentieth century. A consummate draftsman, his early work was characterised by beautifully wrought precise pencil drawings often with watercolour wash. In mid-career the influence of masters of the European landscape tradition such as Corot and Turner are more apparent in paintings using flowing line and tonal nuances while by the later part of his life his large luminous canvasses had evolved into studies in pure light and atmosphere.

Atkinson’s photographic career began in the darkrooms at the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s television studios. She subsequently worked as stills photographer with documentary film crews. In the late 1970s a lengthy stint with naturalist Harry Butler for the ground-breaking series In the Wild, fanned her lifelong passion for the sciences.

In 1982 her photographs of marine invertebrates (a passion that had become an obsession) caught the attention of scientists here and overseas and with their support she launched into a new career as a freelance wildlife photographer.

Rees was active in Sydney-based arts organisations and for many years lectured in painting and drawing at the University of Sydney. He won the Art Gallery of NSW Wynne Prize for landscape twice, in 1950 and 32 years later in 1982.

In 2007 her creative interests turned to printmaking under the guidance of Tony Deigan and on to workshops in Florence run by Robin Ezra and Annie Day. She has exhibited with the Southern Highland Printmakers since 2008.

Rees was already in his eighties when, with the encouragement of David Rankin and Max Miller of Port Jackson Press and lithographer Fred Genis, he began to focus on printmaking. In 1978, at Miller’s East Kangaloon studio in the Southern Highlands, Rees worked with Miller on the Tribute to Sydney series. Miller prepared the soft-ground plates, Rees then drew on the plates after which Miller etched them and in consultation with Rees printed the editions.

GILLIAN BALDOCK

HAROLD CAZNEAUX / 1878 – 1953

Gillian Baldock trained as a teacher in the 1970s and in 1993 completed a Graduate Diploma in Expressive and Performing Arts at the University of NSW. She has been making prints for the past five years. For as long as she can remember she has been passionate about animals so a large part of her artistic practice features animals, both domestic and wild, as well as landscapes and the occasional portrait.

Harold Cazneaux was born in New Zealand in 1878 moving to Adelaide with his family in the 1890s. Despite the restrictions imposed working in photographic studios in Adelaide and Sydney in the early 1900s, in his own photography Cazneaux favoured natural lighting and a small portable camera. Through his imaginative use of natural light, composition and sophisticated printing techniques he created images that went beyond mere visual records, recalling warmth, honesty and an intangible sense of atmosphere.

Her work spans a wide range of media including pastel, graphite, coloured pencil, scratchboard, relief and intaglio printmaking, and occasionally oils.

Her preferred printmaking technique is linocut, often in combination with collagraph plates used to add a greater degree of depth and movement.

She has had a number of solo exhibitions in Moss Vale and has taken part in group exhibitions, including with the Southern Highlands Printmakers, locally and further afield. She has given workshops and has completed commissions for both local and overseas clients.

Although relatively new to printmaking, Baldock enjoys its challenges and possibilities and sees it as a way of enriching and expanding her artistic practice. Her work is held in private collections in Australia and overseas.

Cazneaux held his first solo exhibition in Sydney in 1909 and exhibited regularly from then on in solo and group exhibitions in Sydney and later with the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain. In Australia he became the most highly regarded photographer of his day. Perhaps his most well known image is The Spirit of Endurance 1937, a photograph of an isolated River Red Gum still alive today, in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia.

In 1933 Winifred West, a friend of Cazneaux and founder of Frensham School in Mittagong, asked him to photograph the school and its students.

The Frensham Book containing 100 of his photographs was published in the following year.

LINDA BOTTARI

GWYN HANSSEN PIGOTT / 1935 – 2013

Linda Bottari comes from a large family of commercial printers. As a young girl she observed her uncles setting type and printing on old presses as well as modern offset ones. She found all aspects of the reproduction process fascinating.

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott is recognized as one of Australia’s most significant potters. In 1955 she began her career training with Ivan McMeekin at Sturt Pottery in Mittagong working with him until 1958. She continued throughout her life to explore form, perfect technique, develop clay bodies and glazes and apply this to domestic ware.

These early influences slowly developed into her interest in handmade prints.

It was only after a successful career in commercial printing and publishing that she was able to devote time to her personal interest in printmaking.

For the last five years Bottari has enjoyed exploring and combining various printing techniques. She uses collagraph with linocut and linocut with waterless lithography.

Bottari’s images come from the natural landscape of the Southern Highlands and from places visited overseas. Of particular interest are ancient vessels and medieval stonework where simplicity of form and texture are revealed.

McMeekin had a connection with the English potters Bernard Leach and Michael Cardew and their philosophy informed Hanssen Pigott’s work: to be true to yourself and the pure shape and function of utilitarian pieces; to honour the most simple of forms. During her many years in England she often visited France and eventually set up a pottery in the French countryside. She was attracted to the French style of domestic ware seeing no difference in worth between such wares and one-off pieces.

In 1974 she returned to Australia where she taught and set up potteries in Tasmania, South Australia, and Queensland. From the 1980s onward she began grouping forms into precisely ordered assemblages. Using traditional glazes and forms that are timeless and elegant her work projects both softness and strength.

LISA BRACK

BRETT WHITELEY / 1939 – 1992

Lisa Brack has developed her art practice over the last 30 years and has been making prints since the early 2000s. With a background in pharmacy she is passionate about the natural world and is strongly influenced in her work by the flora and fauna in the environments of the NSW Southern Tablelands and South Coast. Frequent zoo visits also provide her with subjects and references.

Brett Whiteley is one of Australia’s most well-known and prolific artists.

During his career he won the Archibald, Sulman and Wynne Prizes several times. His work is represented in most major Australian public collections as well in the Tate Gallery, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Her printmaking covers a range of techniques used alone and in combination with a view to capturing light, movement and colour. Her recent work is informed by the study of Asian printmaking techniques.

Lisa has taken part in group exhibitions in a number of venues across the Southern Tablelands including in the Goulburn Regional Art Prize. She has work in private collections in Australia, the UK, Ireland, the USA, Canada and Japan.

Whiteley’s visual practice encompassed painting, sculpture and graphic work. He travelled extensively in Australia and overseas and his work reflects a broad range of influences from the paintings of Matisse, Van Gogh and Gauguin to more contemporary artists such as Yves Klein, Francis Bacon and Lloyd Rees. For subject matter Whiteley drew on his own domestic environment, internal emotional and psychological states and the natural world around him.

Throughout his career Whiteley painted the rural landscape of NSW including Berri on the edge of the Southern Tablelands and south-west to Marulan closer to Goulburn. Drawing inspiration, in part from Japanese and Chinese art, Whiteley’s work depicted the landscape as a sanctuary.

If in many of his other themes Whiteley confronted the difficult questions of his psyche, landscape provided a means of escape, an unencumbered absorption into a painless, floating world. iii

BETTY BRAY

ROY DE MAISTRE / 1894 – 1968

A painter printmaker and ceramicist, Betty Bray works from both her studio in Burradoo on the Wingecarribee River in the Southern Highlands and a second studio offering completely different inspiration at Narooma on the NSW South Coast.

Roy de Maistre was born in Sutton Forest, near Bowral and educated in Moss Vale where he began his studies in art and music. He initially chose music as a career but later enrolled in classes at the Royal Art Society in Sydney. During World War l he was inspired by colour-therapy treatment for shell-shocked soldiers and formulated a theory of colour harmonisation based on analogies between colour and music.

Her work is informed by her ongoing fascination with nature, ancient civilizations and organic forms combined with extensive travels and research into ancient sites in the Kimberley and Arnhem Land in northern Australia and in California, New Mexico, China and the United Kingdom. In her latest body of work Bray has worked intuitively, paring her subjects back to basic forms, rhythms and tones to find the underlying connections in the landscape.

Bray has exhibited widely and has been a finalist in numerous significant art awards including the Dobell Drawing Prize, the NSW Parliament Plein Air Award, the Fremantle Print Award, and the Portia Geach Memorial Award for Portraiture. Her work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, the Honolulu Academy of Art, the National Gallery of Wales, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and the International Museum of Ceramics, Faenza, Italy, as well as in numerous regional and private collections across Australia.

In 1919 with fellow painter Roland Wakelin he exhibited the results of their joint experiments. Colour in Art was a groundbreaking exhibition of abstracted compositions using simplification of form, large areas of flattened paint and space. In 1923 he won a Travelling Art Scholarship to Europe returning to Sydney after three years. His work over this time became less abstracted although still informed by his theories of colour and harmony.

De Maistre left Australia permanently in 1931 spending the rest of his life in the UK. He developed a style of academic Cubism that influenced the young Francis Bacon among others and became widely respected as a father of English modernism. In1960 he was honoured by a major retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and in 1962 was awarded the Order of the British Empire.

MARIANNE COURTENAY

ROSALIE GASCOIGNE / 1917 – 1999

Marianne Courtenay is an Australian artist best known as a printmaker specialising in limited edition and unique state collagraph, woodblock and digital prints. Her arts practice spans well over 50 years and as well as printmaking encompasses illustration, painting and sculpture. The recurrent themes in her work are about cycles of time and change: what is remembered and what is forgotten or denied; what is valued and what passes unseen; what’s ephemeral, what endures, and how things transform.

Rosalie Gascoigne was born in New Zealand and worked as an English teacher before moving to Australia in 1943 following her marriage. Her art practice began relatively late in life. She had her first solo exhibition in Sydney aged 57 and over the next 25 years built a remarkable career exhibiting extensively including representing Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1982: the first woman to do so.

Courtenay studied design at the National Art School, Sydney in the early 1960s and holds an Arts Degree in English and archaeology from the University of Sydney. In 1991 she completed a Printmaking Certificate with NSW TAFE. She has taught art at all levels from primary school to university and worked with Aboriginal community groups in western NSW. She has also worked in both a professional and voluntary capacity in arts policy and administration. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally for most of her career. Courtenay’s work is represented in numerous Australian public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, in Australian corporate collections and in private collections in Australia and overseas.

In the early 1970s, drawing on insights gained in doing Ikebana flower arranging, she began to gather weathered and worn rural artifacts and natural items such as grass and feathers. These she arranged into simple, spare compositions that evoked not just the landscape she had grown to know intimately while living at Mount Stromlo near Canberra, but also its moods and emotional resonances.

In search of materials for her assemblages Gascoigne regularly made foraging trips through the grasslands east and north-east of Canberra.

My country is the eastern seabord, Lake George and the Highlands. Land that is clean scoured by the sun and frost.

The record is in the roadside grassiv.

TONY DEIGAN

TOM BASS / 1916 – 2010

Tony Deigan was born in Ireland in 1945 and moved to the UK with his family in 1953. He enrolled in Walthamstow College of Art in London in 1963 subsequently moving to Maidstone College of Art where he studied graphic design graduating with honours in 1967.

Tom Bass left school at 15 and worked in a range of jobs before enrolling in art classes in Sydney in 1937. After World War Two he enrolled at the National Art School, Sydney, to study sculpture under Lynden Dadswell. He then worked as his assistant before returning to the art school to teach in 1950.

He furthered his printmaking studies in Paris on an Anglo-French government scholarship and then taught at Saint Martins School of Art, London until 1991 when he migrated to Australia.

Since then Deigan has worked as a printmaker with numerous Australian artists in addition to maintaining his own creative practice. He currently teaches printmaking with the Bowral and District Art Society. He is represented in public and private collections in Australia and abroad including the print collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

While in his final year at art school Bass received his first sculpture commission. The clients, owners of the property ‘Comfort Hill’ at Sutton Forest in the Southern Highlands, wanted a carving for the fireplace.

During the making and installation of the work, Jack Earth, Bass visited the property a number of times.

Bass was interested in making public art that could remind people of the things that were most important in life and that resonated with them. In his long career he made more than 60 major sculptures. Over time he became increasingly disenchanted with institutional art instruction and in the 1970s set up his own sculpture school in Sydney that still operates. In 2006 art critic John McDonald summed up the sculptor’s achievements writing that no artist has done more to shape the face of public art in Australia than Tom Bass v.

MARGARET FEGENT

ELIOTH GRUNER / 1882 – 1939

Margaret Fegent has lived in the Southern Highlands for 30 years and is now based in Mittagong. Following a career in education she completed a Diploma in Fine Arts at TAFE NSW, Moss Vale in 2013.

She has participated in several local group exhibitions and while she enjoys drawing and painting, printmaking has become her main focus.

Elioth Gruner, was born in New Zealand in 1882 but his family moved to Australia when he was a baby. He studied under Julian Ashton in Sydney, supporting his family with work as a draper’s assistant until the age of 30 when growing recognition enabled him to become a full-time artist.

Fegent’s prints are often developed from sketches and photos taken during travels in Australia and overseas. The images of actual places are recorded in photographs; impressions are captured in sketchbooks with quick drawings and watercolours. These records then provide the inspiration for her work. Textures and changing light effects in the landscape are characteristic of her prints. Recently, she has been developing her relief printing skills with reduction and multi-plate prints as well as experimenting with different effects by combining linocuts with monoprints and collagraphs.

Gruner was influenced by the tonal theories of Max Meldrum, the watercolourist J J Hilder and the French painter Corot. His work was popular with the general public and his contemporaries alike who admired his sensitive response to the Australian countryside. He was awarded the Art Gallery of NSW Wynne Prize for landscape seven times during his career. His most famous work, Spring Frost 1919 remains one of the most popular paintings in the Art Gallery of NSW. In 1923 he travelled to London and later to Italy and France. Upon his return from Europe in 1925, he continued his ‘rambles’vi in the countryside but he suffered from depression that dogged him for the rest of his life.

Gruner had a strong connection with the NSW Southern Highlands.

Between 1916 and the early 1930s he visited and painted on several properties including ‘Lancefield’, Moss Vale and ‘Willyama’, Bowral.

He died in Sydney in 1939.

LYNNE FLEMONS

JOSEPH LYCETT / 1774 – 1825

Lynne Flemons grew up in the Southern Tablelands of NSW in the 1960s.

As a child she often accompanied her father whose work as an agronomist took him into many parts of the NSW rural landscape including the Southern Tablelands. In 2015 Flemons received a Master of Philosophy degree from the Australian National University. Much of the research she undertook for this is grounded in these early experiences and in her memories of the land.

Both her exegesis and her exhibition for the degree were titled Walking at Weereewa (Lake George) and a significant amount of her recent work still relates to this.

Lycett worked as a professional portrait and miniature painter before being transported to Australia for forgery in 1813. In the colony his talents were valued and he spent most of his time recording the growing colony in meticulous sketches and watercolours used by the authorities to promote voluntary immigration and given as gifts to important dignitaries. He was pardoned in 1821 and returned to England planning to publish a series of illustrations of NSW but the enterprise failed. He is best remembered for his invaluable renderings of traditional Aboriginal life of the time.

In her printmaking practice Flemons specialises in multiple-plate monoprinting, using painting, stencils and cutouts to develop her imagery. She has been teaching, exhibiting and participating in artist residencies for over 25 years and is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia and in numerous other public, corporate and private collections in Australia and overseas. She is based in Goulburn, NSW.

Lycett’s painting View of Lake George, NSW, from the North-East was in fact probably based on an earlier work by surveyor George Evans, who accompanied Governor Macquarie on his trip to the lake in 1820. It is one of many paintings used by historian Bill Gammage to argue for the sophisticated manner in which Aboriginal people managed the land.

Gammage notes that the almost ‘English estate’ like character of the countryside was remarked on by many early European explorers and is testament to the skilful way Aboriginal people managed their environment vii.

DOROTHY FREEMAN

SYDNEY LONG / 1871 – 1955

Dorothy Freeman began her art career later in life after marriage, children and living overseas for many years. Eventually, back in Australia, she enrolled in art classes at Hornsby TAFE. Printmaking became a major interest and she pursued this further at East Sydney TAFE in the early 1980s where she specialised in etching processes. She followed this with a Diploma in Painting and Drawing from the Royal Art Society and further studies in art theory and history. In 1997 she completed a Master of Art History and Theory from the University of Sydney.

Sydney Long was born in Goulburn NSW in 1871. During the 1890s he studied painting in Sydney with Alfred Daplyn, Frank Mahony and Julian Ashton at the Art Society of NSW. He went to England in 1919 and studied etching with Frank Samuel and Malcolm Osborne, and in 1921 became an Associate of the Royal Society of Painters/Etchers (London).

Long returned to Australia, was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW in 1933, and won the Art Gallery of NSW Wynne Prize for landscape in 1938 and 1940. He died in London in 1955.

Freeman believes that her oil painting has influenced the way she approaches her printmaking, often resulting in the production of painterly prints achieved through the multi- layering of colour that allows her to express herself as a painter.

In Australia Long became the leading exponent of the new Art Nouveau style of the 1890s. This style favoured flat pattern and linear composition and suited Long's uniquely imaginative and poetic approach to the landscape. In 1898 Long famously captured the Greek god Pan on a canvas of the same name in an imagined antipodean Arcadia. Pan also appears in Long’s works The Spirit of the Plains 1897 and Fantasy 1916 1917. Long reproduced all three of these works as etchings in 1919.

Freeman has exhibited regularly since the early 1980s and has won numerous awards including the Wingecarribee Print Prize in 2009. Her work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and the National Museum of Wales as well as numerous public and private collections across Australia.

BASIL HALL Basil Hall has spent most of his working life as a teacher and editioning printer for other artists. He trained under Jorg Schmeisser at Canberra School of Art, Australian National University (ANU), majoring in printmaking. From 1987-1996 he was a printmaking lecturer at the ANU and the Director, then Editioning Manager, of Studio One National Print Workshop in Canberra. In 1996 he moved to Darwin with his family to take up a position as Printmaking Lecturer at the Northern Territory University (NTU, now Charles Darwin University). In this position he was able to nurture and develop Northern Editions, the NTU's new printmaking business, which had been established to work with Aboriginal communities.

In 2002 Hall started his own business, Basil Hall Editions, which, from its original base in Darwin and since 2012 from Canberra and Braidwood NSW, has continued to collaborate with hundreds of indigenous and non-indigenous artists from the NT, WA, SA and Australia's major cities. Hall runs regular workshops, primarily in etching, woodblock and screen printing, all over Australia and annually from a studio in Skopelos, Greece, and prints regularly for his Aboriginal clients from remote communities in the north.

DAVID MOORE / 1927 – 2003 Moore captured moments of great clarity in the human condition.

His attitude to life was evident in the essential beauty and vitality he found in his subjects.viii David Moore was one of Australia’s most eminent photographers and photojournalists. In addition to the photographs he made in Australia and overseas for magazines such as Time Life and National Geographic, Moore was influential in helping to establish photography as a legitimate art form in Australia. He took as his subject artists in their studios, the famous, the landscape, indigenous peoples and migrants in the 1960s and 70s. He exhibited widely and undertook numerous major commissions during his long career in Australia and abroad. He was one of the founders of the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney and undertook research into the history of Australian photography, publishing many books. Sadly his life was cut short days before a major retrospective of his work opened at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA).

Moore went to school in the Southern Highlands at Tudor House in Moss Vale and took one of his most memorable early photographs there Malcolm Fraser (centre) and fellow pupils, Tudor House 1940.

JOHN HART

GRACE CROWLEY / 1890 – 1979

John Hart is a contemporary artist and printmaker, living and working in Canberra, Australia. He has a Bachelor of Visual Arts (hons.) from the Australian National University (ANU) School of Art majoring in print media and drawing.

Grace Crowley was an early champion of Australian modernism. In the mid 1920s she travelled to Paris to join her friend, painter Anne Dangar. In Paris Dangar introduced her to the work of Cezanne, Modigliani, and other great modernist painters. Importantly, she met Cubist André Lhote and enrolled at his academy where she began experimenting with geometric abstraction.

Since graduating in 2010, Hart has worked as a sessional screen-printing lecturer at the ANU School of Art, and as Press Studio Manager at Megalo Print Studio and Gallery in Canberra. From 2009 to 2012 he produced the on-line collage magazine Collagista and organised an exhibition of subscribers’ works at the ANU School of Art in 2011.

He has exhibited his work in solo and group shows in the ACT, Victoria and New South Wales and is the current president of the Southern Highlands Printmakers.

In 1930 she returned to Sydney setting up the Crowley–Fizelle School with painter Rah Fizelle in 1932. The school fostered artists with an interest in abstraction, including Frank Hinder, and Ralph Balson. Following the school’s closure in 1938, Crowley and Balson began painting together, developing their use of abstraction. After his retirement in 1955, Balson travelled between Sydney and Crowley's home in Mittagong, where he had a garden studio. They worked together until his death in 1964, with Crowley neglecting her own work and increasingly supporting Balson’s practice.

After his death, Crowley put a great deal of energy into ensuring Balson and others from their circle were represented in state collections. For this reason (together with the fact that she destroyed much of her own work) Grace Crowley has never truly claimed her rightful place in the pantheon of great Australian painters.

FRAN IFOULD

CHRISTOPH ALTENBURG / 1937 – 2008

Fran Ifould was born in Sydney and studied ceramics at East Sydney Technical College in the early 1970s under such notables as Peter Rushforth, Shiga Shigeo and Col Levy. Thirty years of art practice in ceramics led to a change to working with paper and in 2008 she undertook a Master of Visual Art at the Canberra School of Art, ANU focusing on printmaking.

Since then while retaining her strong interest in surface texture, Ifould has been working with paper: in 2D with drafting and printmaking, and in 3D using techniques from the making of artists’ books to develop large scale works and sculptural pieces.

Christoph Altenburg began life as a Hapsburg prince. He ended it as a silversmith, painter and philosopher in Braidwood, NSW. ‘In Austria and Europe’ he said, ‘you are made by tradition. In Australia you make the tradition’.ix It was this idea that led him to abandon the demands of Austrian royalty, arriving in Melbourne in 1960 as a modest ten-pound immigrant. He welcomed the freedom of Australia and worked on farms from Tasmania to Western Australia and in mining in the Pilbara.

Ifould’s work frequently addresses contemporary environmental issues, often using natural dyes extracted from plants from particular locations she is investigating. She also draws on her background in ceramics and the traditional brushwork used in sign-writing. By adopting the surface of the paper as a metaphor for the land itself, her work evokes geological and biological elements and the layers of history and use, in an approach emphasizing 'tenure' of the land, rather than 'ownership'.

Altenburg subsequently studied silversmithing in Austria, Denmark and England before settling in Braidwood with his Australian wife Kirsty and raising a family. Studio Altenburg, the gallery they established, became a showcase for quality art and craft including Altenburg’s own silverware.

His jewelry was worn around the world, and his paintings, with their irreverent social comment, were much sort after.

In 1985 Altenburg started the Braidwood Iron Corroboree as a celebration of all things metal. This event forged a community of enthusiasts who still meet annually. On the occasion of his death in 2008, The Canberra Times eulogised that the former royal continued to be ‘a prince among men’ due to his generosity, free spirit and compassion.

LIZ JENEID

THEA PROCTOR / 1879 – 1966

After studying weaving at Penland School in North Carolina, USA in the early 1970s, Liz Jeneid returned to Australia where she set up a production weaving workshop in Rozelle. With assistance from the Community Arts Board of the Australia Council she was able to train apprentice weavers.

This was an exciting time - the craft movement was strong, the first Craft Expos were held in Sydney and Melbourne and galleries were selling hand woven garments.

Thea Proctor was born in 1879 in Armidale. In her teens together with her mother and brother she lived with her grandparents at Bowral. Her interest in painting was encouraged and she won a prize at the Bowral Amateur Art Society's annual exhibition. She subsequently attended Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School. She exhibited with the Society of Artists and began work as a designer and illustrator.

In 1983 she was invited to teach part-time at the University of Wollongong where she taught for the next 20 years, first in the textile department then in other areas of the visual arts. The change from studio work to teaching provided an opportunity to experiment with ideas that allowed her to work with many other materials. Artists’ books have long been part of her body of work and this led to her studying printmaking.

Jeneid has had a number of residencies in Australia and overseas including in Paris, Spain, the USA, and on ships going to the Arctic and Antarctic.

Her work is held in numerous public collections in Australia including the National Library and the National Gallery of Australia and regional galleries across the country.

Apart from a brief stint back in Australia in 1912/13 Proctor spent the years 1903 to 1921 in England where she continued her studies mixing with George Lambert and other expatriate artists and becoming well known for her lithographic work. Charles Conder inspired her interest in fan painting but there were many other influences such as Japanese prints and the drawings of Ingres.

Back in Sydney in the 1920s Proctor exhibited successfully with Margaret Preston. Over the next 30 years she continued to exhibit her painting and prints and undertook portraits on commission. She also worked as a designer for The Home magazine and other publications, later extending her practice into theater and interior design and writing about home decor.

She did much to promote printmaking in Australia, particularly through her teaching. She died in Sydney in 1966.

PATRICIA JONES

LOUISA ATKINSON / 1834 – 1872

Patricia Jones studied fine arts at Moss Vale TAFE from 2001 - 2005.

She has a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Visual) and a Graduate Diploma in Education (2009).

Louisa Atkinson was the daughter of James and Charlotte of ‘Oldbury’, Sutton Forest, in the NSW Southern Highlands. Her father was a pioneer farmer, her mother a teacher, author and artist. Born with a weak heart, Atkinson was home schooled by her mother who encouraged her natural aptitude for the arts. She became an expert botanist and plant collector at a time when Australia’s fauna and flora was a source of discovery for naturalists, botanists and scholars, who depended on people such as Atkinson for botanical drawings and plant specimens. She recorded beautiful drawings of animals, birds, insects, reptiles, trees and plants in her sketchbooks. Her writings and illustrations were published in major newspapers reporting on Australia’s newly discovered and diverse flora and fauna.

Jones works in printmaking, textiles and painting from her Fire Shed Studio in Medway, a quiet village just west of Berrima in the NSW Southern Highlands. Her knowledge of texture, colour and design is reflected in her energetic artworks. Art journaling, photography and Photoshop play an important part in her creative process. Her research into her identity and sense of self has led Jones to examine the environment and the social influences around her. Caring for the environment, its cultural diversity and bringing attention to the alteration created by our habitation are recurrent themes in her work.

Jones’ recent prints explore the adaption or otherwise of introduced plants in Australia. Every lino print in an edition is individually hand-coloured. Her etchings, taken from her drawings and journals, are drawn directly onto the plate giving each print its own unique quality. Patricia Jones’ work is represented in numerous private and public collections.

Louisa Atkinson was also a talented writer, publishing her first novel Gertrude, The Emigrant: a tale of colonial life in 1857 at the age of 23. The novel included more than 20 woodcut illustrations and detailed drawings from her sketchbooks. Regarded as the first Australian-born female colonial artist, Louisa Atkinson died at 38 and is buried at the All Saints Anglican Church, Sutton Forest.

SHEILA LYNE

JOYCE ALLEN / 1916 – 1992

Sheila Lyne was born in Southampton, England in 1950 and migrated to Australia in 1971. Lyne studied printmaking as part of a Diploma in Visual Arts at Moss Vale TAFE. She graduated with a distinction in printmaking and is continuing her studies at Meadowbank TAFE in Sydney. Lyne has been exhibiting for five years including at The Incinerator, Willoughby, in Sydney, at Belconnen Arts Centre, Canberra and Bowral Art Gallery in the Southern Highlands.

Joyce Allen was born in Brisbane in 1916. She began her art practice as a self-taught painter of watercolour, landscapes, not taking up printmaking until the late 1940s when she began making linocuts. In the 1950s Allen studied under Thea Proctor and then in the early 1960s became seriously involved in prints when she joined the Willoughby Workshop, one of the key centres for printmaking at that time.

Lyne is interested in the history of art, textile and botany. She works in a range of printmaking techniques: etching, collagraph, lithography, lino and woodcut. Her work is particularly inspired by the ocean and coastal landscape of the NSW South Coast, the Minnamurra native rainforest and plants in her garden. Using her observations, photographs and drawings she re-imagines fanciful forms in both print and ceramics.

In addition to the Southern Highlands Printmakers, Lyne is a member of Port Kembla Editioners, The Sculptors Society, Sydney, The Australian Ceramics Association and the International Association of Paper Making Artists.

Allen’s strong sense of design and composition and her skills as a draftswoman were ideally suited to linocut. With just a few deft cuts to her block she was an expert in capturing the life of her subjects: their posture, stance, and expression. In 1970 she and her husband moved to Bowral and she taught part-time at the Bowral and District Art Society in its early years.

Allen exhibited regularly throughout her career including with the Sydney Printmakers, in Australian Print Council exhibitions and in 1968 with other leading Australian printmakers in the Bradford Print Biennale, UK. In 1991 she received an Emeritus Award from the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board. She died in 1992 shortly after the opening of a major retrospective of her work at the Macquarie Galleries, Sydney.

PHOEBE MIDDLETON

POSSUM SKIN CLOAKS OF THE GUNDUNGURRA / PRE-COLONIAL

Phoebe Middleton grew up in the Southern Highlands before moving to Adelaide in 1988 to attend the University of South Australia where she completed a Bachelor of Design, majoring in illustration, printmaking and design. Four years at Walt Disney Animation Studios followed. The experience provided tremendous production and technical foundations for a career creating and art directing original animated concepts and shorts for a global audience. Her work received awards for design in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Asia.

The possum skin cloak was an essential part of indigenous culture and way of life for the Gundungurra people of the Southern Highlands. Traditionally a cloak was decorated with stories and symbols relevant to the individual and the tribe. The cloak provided waterproofing, warmth and shelter. It was used as a sling to carry infants and could even be stretched across an individual’s knees as a drum. Eventually the person was buried in it.

Middleton moved to Hobart in 2008 determining to focus again on printmaking. Strong graphic patterns, lines and character poses are dominant features of her printed work, reminiscent of her animation styling. The graphic qualities of linocuts and screen prints provide perfect media for the transition from animation to print. Layering tone and textures provide depth and complexity.

The impact of white settlers on the Gundungurra was extreme. European fences made traditional lands inaccessible and the indigenous people no longer had unlimited access to possums, kangaroos and the animals that had sustained them. The blankets given to replace the waterproof warmth of cloaks were ineffective, leading to rheumatism, pneumonia and other debilitating illnesses.

In 2012 Middleton’s linocut Silver Rabbits of Betsy Island was acquired at the Silk Cut Awards for the National Gallery of Australia print collection. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales. Middleton and her press returned to the Southern Highlands in 2013.

Researching the imagery for Nellie’s Possum Skin Cloak, Phoebe Middleton interviewed Aunty Wendy Lotter, a local elder, who captivated Middleton with her knowledge of the traditional owners and their land. She explained Nellie’s Glen, located near Robertson, was a ‘woman’s area’: a place where women came together to share knowledge and learn from each other. This is a significant theme in Middleton’s work.

LUCIA PARRELLA

ARTHUR BOYD / 1920 – 1999

Lucia Parrella works across print and other media to reflect on aspects of memory, language and cultural identity. Her most recent body of work, The Garden of the Fugitives (Il Giardino dei Fuggitivi) draws on mythology and tales of metamorphosis to speak of the precariousness of our life on earth.

One of the pillars of Australian modernism, Arthur Boyd was born into a prominent family of painters, potters, architects and writers. The war years made a deep impression on the young artist and images of violence, deformity and dispossession feature regularly in his paintings of the time. His repertoire of archetypal figures and hybrid forms drawn from classical and biblical mythology and are often imbued with a sense of menace or foreboding.

Parrella studied English and Italian at the University of Sydney and creative arts at the University of Wollongong where she majored in printmaking.

Subsequently, she trained at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, specialising in book arts and contemporary Italian printmaking. She has exhibited regularly since 1996 and her prints are held in public and private collections including the Research Library, Art Gallery of NSW, the Queensland State Library and the National Gallery of Australia print collection.

She continues to maintain a strong connection with Italy, undertaking artist residencies, conducting workshops and facilitating exchange exhibitions.

In Australia, Parrella also works as a community cultural development practitioner facilitating printmaking, storytelling and other creative projects aimed at increasing the participation of diverse communities in cultural activities.

Boyd was active in the Melbourne art scene of the post -World War 2 years and in 1959 moved with his family to the UK. However he continued to use Australian settings and subjects in much of his work. He returned to Australia in 1971 and in 1978 he and his wife bought a property near Nowra on the NSW South Coast that remained his base and an inspiration for his painting for the rest of his life.

Boyd made prints throughout his career. Among others, he worked with printmaker Max Miller at Kangaloon and with Indra and Tony Deigan with whom he collaborated to produce images for an artist’s book which is one of the inspiration sources for Lucia Parrella’s work in this exhibition.

ALAN PURDOM

RALPH BALSON / 1890 – 1964

Alan Purdom studied graphic arts at the National Art School, Sydney, from 1956 to 1961. During this time he commenced studies in oil painting with David Strachan and sculpture with the Lyndon Dadswell School as well as completing an interior design course. In 1965 he joined the staff of the new School of Architecture at the NSW Institute of Technology (now the University of Technology, Sydney) where he worked for a number of years.

During this period he also studied ceramics.

Born in Dorset England, Ralph Balson was apprenticed to a plumber and house painter. In 1913 he migrated to Sydney, living first at Bondi and then at Pagewood. He supported his wife and three children by house painting, studying art in his spare time.

In 1973 Purdom moved to the Southern Highlands where he worked as a free-lance graphic designer for the Commonwealth Department of Education, designing magazines and educational and promotional materials. He also worked in the field of cartooning creating a weekly cartoon for Reid Publishing.

Purdom joined the Southern Highlands Printmakers at its inception in 1993.

He has worked with a number of printmaking techniques: etching (under Max Miller), linocut, collagraph and serigraphy. He has also developed a technique of stamping in which colours are overlaid continuously in regular patterns to create depth of tone. Alan Purdom is represented in a range of public and private collections.

In the 1920s he studied until its closure at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney under Grace Crowley, Anne Dangar, Henry Gibbons and Ashton.

Later he was invited to work in Grace Crowley’s studio in George Street, Sydney and then in 1954 in a garden studio in her newly purchased home, ‘High Hill’, on Mount Gibraltar between Bowral and Mittagong.

Crowley followed Balson’s lead into a looser, more gestural form of abstraction that was quite new to the art scene in Australia. Balson’s painting No. 9 1959 is one of these more gestural works and is the inspiration for Alan Purdom’s work in Continuum.

HANNAH QUINLIVAN

GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH / 1892 – 1984

Hannah Quinlivan’s work spans multiple media and materials and explores how our individual, internal processes of feeling and remembering are related to broader social moods and how the affective atmospheres of our time are shared, transmitted and transmuted.

Grace Cossington Smith is considered one of Australia’s most important modernists, and arguably our foremost Post-Impressionist. Born in 1892, in 1910 -1911 she enrolled in drawing classes at the Dattilo Rubbo School in Sydney. She then spent two years in England where she also attended drawing classes. On her return to Australia she again enrolled at the Dattilo Rubbo School, this time in painting. Throughout her career she worked mostly in Sydney and surrounding areas including Bowral and what would later become Canberra.

Quinlivan holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Australian National University graduating as dux with first class honours in 2013. She is currently pursuing doctoral research in visual arts at The Australian National University.

In April-May 2017 she was a visiting artist at Colorado State University.

In 2017, she held major exhibitions at the Centre for Art and Urbanistics in Berlin, Canberra Museum and Art Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Deakin University and Hong Kong Art Central. In the last five years she has exhibited in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, United Kingdom and Germany.

Quinlivan’s work is held in numerous public, corporate and private collections in Australia and overseas. She is represented by Flinders Lane Gallery in Melbourne, and .M Contemporary in Sydney.

Influenced by Post-Impressionists like Cézanne, she led a break away from Impressionism. Her subject matter was wide ranging, including landscapes, interiors, portraits, flowers and cityscapes. Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of her practice is her attentiveness to light in Australian pastoral and urban landscapes.

Her painting style is characterised by individual brush strokes laid on the canvas in bright, unblended colours that merge into a whole as the viewer steps back from the image. Her work depicting the incomplete Sydney Harbour Bridge, The Bridge in Curve 1930 is considered to be one of the most significant of Australian modernist paintings.

SANDRA SHRUBB

FRANK HURLEY / 1885 – 1962

Sandra Shrubb has worked in the arts sector since the 1980s at Australian Craftworks, in Sydney, The Flying Pig Gallery, Berry, and most recently at Sturt Craft Centre in Mittagong. She comes from a photographic and horticultural background. In 1995 she enrolled as a mature age student at The University of Tasmania, Hobart and completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1998 majoring in photography. She completed further studies in printmaking at Wollongong, Moss Vale and Goulburn TAFE campuses.

Frank Hurley was an exceptional photographer; a master technician in the darkroom and above all, a risk-taker and showman. He lived an extraordinary life, running away from home at 13 to work in a foundry and ending up as the official photographer for several Antarctic expeditions and for Australian Forces in both world wars.

In 2002 Shrubb moved to the Southern Highlands and since then has exhibited regularly with the Southern Highlands Printmakers. Prior to this she exhibited in group exhibitions in Tasmania including a solo exhibition in Hobart in 1997. In 1989 she was commissioned by the Art Gallery of NSW and the National Gallery of Victoria to produce support artworks for the touring exhibition German Expressionism: The colours of desire.

Drawing on her extensive travels within Australia and the Himalayas, Shrubb incorporates her love of imagery into her printmaking practice using screenprint, relief print, etching, monotype and digital print for her installations and wall pieces.

At 25, having learnt of Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic Expedition, Hurley determined to be the official photographer. He arranged to have a tenminute interview with Mawson at Central Station, Sydney, where Mawson was catching a train to Melbourne. Believing the interview was too short Hurley purchased a ticket as far as Moss Vale travelling in Mawson’s compartment. And during the two-hour journey convinced Mawson to take him on as the expedition’s official photographer.

Over a long career Hurley produced many documentaries and books on his Antarctic expeditions and journeys in Papua and Australia. Nonetheless his Antarctic photography is perhaps his greatest body of work.

BRITTA STENMANNS

BERT FLUGELMAN / 1923 – 2013

Britta Stenmanns studied graphic design in Dusseldorf, undertook a three year woodcarving apprenticeship in Bavaria and in 1994 completed a Diploma of Painting at the School of Fine Arts in Bremen, Germany.

Stenmanns’ artistic practice has taken her to London, Madrid, Deya (Spain) and Mexico City where she competed post-graduate studies in painting and printmaking at the Academia San Carlos.

Aged 15, Bert Flugelman arrived in Australia from Vienna in 1938. He studied at Sydney’s National Art School and then travelled to Europe returning to Australia in 1955. In the 1960s he worked at the Tin Sheds at Sydney University where he pushed the boundaries of contemporary sculpture in collaborative works such as Feathered Room 1971. In 1972 he became the head of sculpture at the South Australian School of Art moving in 1984 to teach at the University of Wollongong.

She has had solo exhibitions in Mexico, Germany, and in New South Wales and the ACT and numerous group exhibitions in Germany, Spain, Mexico, France, Poland, Belgium and Australia. Stenmanns was selected for Sculpture by the Sea in Sydney in 2007and has won a number of awards for her work including the Bowral and District Art Society Sculpture Prize in 2013 (for outdoor work) and 2017, and the 2016 Wingecarribee Landscape Prize. She has work in the print collection of the Australian National Gallery, Canberra and is represented in public collections in Poland, Germany, and the UK and in a range of private collections in Australia and elsewhere.

From the 1970s Flugelman began working with simple geometric shapes and experimenting with materials such as fibreglass and aluminium. But his large stainless steel forms are arguably his most powerful works.

Cones 1976 – 1982 is one such example: a series of stainless steel interconnected forms creating for the moving viewer a distorted world of reflections on a backdrop of rigid geometrical three dimensional shapes.

As a maker of public art Flugelman’s work did not escape some negative comment but today he is recognised as one of the major figures in Australian sculpture of the twentieth century. In his later years he settled in Bowral where he died in 2013.

SLAVICA ZIVKOVIC

JEAN APPLETON / 1911 – 2003

Slavica Zivkovic studied art at the National Art School from 1987 to1989 majoring in printmaking. She subsequently completed further studies in ceramics at the Illawarra Institute of Technology. Her work explores the relationship between her own sense of identity and journey and the spirituality that shapes it. She uses symbolic narratives that gather and create a sense of the sacred to seek connection to the world.

Born in Sydney in 1911, Jean Appleton enrolled at the National Art School, East Sydney Technical College in 1929 determined to become a professional artist. After seeing an exhibition of post-impressionist prints in Sydney she became obsessed with the idea of travelling to see the original works and to find out more about modernist art. Denied permission by her father it was not until after his death in 1938 that she finally set out. In London she studied at the Westminster School of Art and was strongly influenced by tutors Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler and contemporary British figurative painting.

Zivkovic has been exhibiting for over 30 years in both solo and group shows; has been a finalist in the Jacques Cadry Award and the Blake Prize (2011 and 2013) and was nominated in 2009 by Sasha Grishin for the Sovereign Art Prize, Hong Kong. She has taken part in several art exchange projects including Project Belgium in Brussels and the Vario Print Exchange which was exhibited in Wales, Honolulu and a number of venues in NSW and Queensland.

Zivkovic has instigated several art projects while volunteering abroad and has undertaken a residency at the Centre d’Art i Natura de Farrera de Pallars in Spain. For over 20 years she has specialised in teaching art to children and young adults. She is represented in public and private collections.

ENDNOTES i

John and Joan Stephens, Papers of John and Joan Stephens (manuscript). http://trove.nla.gov.au/version/34774457

ii

Ibid

iii

Barry Pearce, Brett Whiteley: Art and life, AGNSW, Sydney, 1995, p 196

iv

James Mollison and S. Heath, ‘Rosalie Gascoigne: In her own words’, in Deborah Edwards (ed.), Rosalie Gascoigne: Material as landscape, AGNSW, Sydney, 1997, p 7

v

Malcolm Brown, ‘Bass, Thomas Dwyer (Tom) (1916–2010)', Obituaries Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, Canberra

vi

Barry Pearce, Elioth Gruner 1882 – 1939, AGNSW, Sydney, 1983

vii

Bill Gammage, The Greatest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia,

viii

Gael Newton, The Spread of Time: The photography of David Moore,

ix

Fran Ifould in conversation with Christoph Altenburg, Braidwood, 2008

Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2011 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2003

As war loomed Appleton returned to Australia where she continued to paint and to teach. She exhibited with the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney and in the ensuing years won numerous art awards including the inaugural Portia Geach Award for Portraiture in 1965 After a decade in England in the 1970s she settled in Moss Vale with her second husband, painter Tom Green. She continued to paint well into her later years and in 1996 had a retrospective of her work at the Campbelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery. She died at 91 in 2003.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to the staff of the Goulburn Regional Art Gallery for their support with this project, and to Jane Cush and Angela D’Elia who were the gallery director and curator respectively when the exhibition was first proposed. Their assistance has been invaluable. Thank you also to Dr Anne Sanders who wrote the supporting catalogue essay. And finally many thanks to Ingrid Skirka and to elder Aunty Wendy Lotter who so generously and enthusiastically helped Phoebe Middleton with her investigations into the traditional possum skin cloaks worn by the Gundungurra people.

ISBN: 978-0-646-97375-3 © Southern Highlands Printmakers PO Box 2540 Bowral NSW 2576 www.southernhighlandsprintmakers.com Produced with the support of the goulburn.art REGIONAL GALLERY, Goulburn NSW All images have been reproduced with the permission of the artists Design and layout: Jessie Winch Photography: Brenton McGeachie – unless otherwise specified Nattai River Landscape with Rocks (The Crags) 2 - Tony Ameneiro Ancient Harvest - Kelly Sturgiss Selective Memory - Hannah Quinlivan Printer: Tien Wah Press, Singapore

goulburn.art REGIONAL GALLERY is supported by Goulburn Mulwaree Council and assisted by the NSW Government through Create NSW