Nora Heysen’s (1911–2003) life has been driven by an unwavering passion for art. This publication brings together Heysen’s work from her early years as a young 16-year-old art student in the 1920s, to the rare, masterly confidence of her later years. As Lou Klepac writes, ’what may appear as a simple still life is in fact a miraculous moment.’
This book is compiled from the portraits of artists and friends which the artist has painted for her own pleasure. It includes extracts from unpublished sections of her diaries.
A great artist may be enabled, late in life, to discover and reveal to himself and to us, the deepest secrets of his art. For over three decades from the late 1950s onwards, John Coburn's art impressed the widest public, both in Australia and overseas. His prolific output of paintings, prints and tapestries expressed an apparently endless artistic imagination. Over much of the same period he was a highly effective art educator. But that brilliant career was abruptly broken into, at the height of success, by personal tragedy and life-threatening illness resulting in serious physical disability. The artist's life and work up to that rupture has been the subject of several studies, but his subsequent deepening maturity and the stream of subtle masterpieces of the 'master of colour' call for new recognition and appreciation. To penetrate into Coburn's development in these years, the author proceeds through an investigation of the mysterious nature of colour itself; the determining events and influences of the artist's life including the early impact of the Australian landscape and his fascination with the work of painters such as Miro, Matisse and Rothko; the culmination of his refined technique and colour experience in the ground-breaking tapestries - and the impact of crisis in the mid-1980s. Returning, now, to the theme of colour and the artist, we are shown how unremitting artistic striving and the impacts of life, coalesce in the creative impulses which release the magnificent 'late works'. The book admits us to the artist's private studio, to join as onlookers in the production of these haunting works. The book contains 147 colour plates as well as documentary photographs and comprehensive biographical notes and exhibition lists.
On a summer holiday in Peregian in December 1982 to January 1983, I worked on this sequence of decalcomanias using collage to enhance the suggestions I discovered in the random dispositions of the pigment. To convert it to a landscape I applied a film of black or coloured tissue papers, often in layers, and I competed the transformation by adding a further collage of images as extensions of the implications provided by the paint." So wrote James Gleeson in the foreword to the twenty-two works made at Peregian Beach in Queensland which were later bound into a volume titled Peregian Codex. It was a vital moment for Gleeson the artist. He had decided to give up his public commitments as visiting curator, lecturer and author and to devote himself totally to painting. Home from his annual holiday, Gleeson set out on his great series of late works of which Reef painted in 1983 is the first. The Author Lou Klepac emigrated to Australia in 1950 and was educated at Perth Modern School and the University of Western Australia. He was Curator of Paintings at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and at the Art Gallery of South Australia. He rejoined Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1974 where he was Senior Curator and then Deputy Director (1974-80). Among the many exhibitions he has curated are Sickert paintings (1986) contemporary Drawing (1977) and Giorgio Morandi paintings and etchings (1977). Among the books he has published are Russell Drysdale, 1983, Australian Painters of the 20th Century, 2000William Robinson, 2001, John Coburn, 2003, Jeffrey Smart, 2005 and Rick Amor, 2008.
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