Roz Kean has been interviewed in a podcast about her time in Japan researching the practice of Mokuhanga printmaking.
Canadian based Andre Zadoronzy has been producing an international series of podcasts called The Unfinished Print ,focused on the practice of Mokuhanga ( Japanese Traditional Woodblock Printing with pigment and water)
https://theunfinishedprint.libsyn.com/roslyn-kean-printmaker-the-spectrum-of-colours-that-exist
Many members of Sydney Printmakers will be showing in the
Paper section at Sydney Contemporary 11-14 September
this is just some of the work
Booth B02 Tiliqua Tiliqua Print Studio and Gallery: representing Ro Murray and Lois Waters
Booth B10 Up Space : representing Therese Kenyon and Seraphina Martin
Booth B17 Sydney Printmakers: representing Tina Barahanos, Anthea Boesenberg, Angela Hayson and Andrew Totman. They will be giving artist talks Saturday 1.30pm in the Paper section.
Booth B12 Gary Shinfield Studio and Collection: Gary Shinfield, Seong Cho, Nathalie Gautier-Hartog.
All three artists will be giving an artists talk on Saturday 13th September at 3pm in the Paper section.
Booth B23 Jenny Robinson Studio: Jenny Robinson, Angela Hayson, Janet Parker Smith
The work in this installation reconfigures found materials from our urban landscape and repurposes prints from the artists collection from over the past 30 years. Look and you might see recognisable materials from everyday life that have been transformed into new creatures, objects and forms.
Using different art forms including collage, printmaking, digital print, ceramics, knitting and textiles combined with chattels from the everyday, these materials come together to create an artwork known as the ‘Wicked Garden’. Showing a flight of imagination it looks at ideas around our changing environment, friendships and adapting to new surroundings.
About Janet Parker-Smith
Janet Parker-Smith has a cross disciplinary process using Printmedia, sculpture and collage to create her work. She has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for over 30 years. Janet is well known as a local arts worker and also is a sessional teacher at the National Art School and Sydney Collage of the Arts.
Artist talks
Janet Parker-Smith In Conversation Saturday 9 December 11am
Visit the Ridge Street Window Gallery, 43 Ridge Street, North Sydney 7 days per week until 10pm.
BALDESSIN – THE LEGACY – TWO EXHIBITIONS: George Baldessin & Baldessin Studio
Exhibition Dates: 25 October – 12 November 2022
28 & 35 Derby Street Collingwood VIC 3066
Open 7 days 10am to 6pm
George Baldessin Exhibition
This highly anticipated exhibition features a collection of George Baldessin’s iconic prints, as well as a significant selection of works that have never been exhibited before, including drawings, paintings and sculpture.
The Baldessin Studio
This vibrant group exhibition presents works created at the Baldessin Studio by 29 contemporary artists, both established and emerging, working across a wide range of styles, genres and techniques.
Susan Baran is one of the selected artists.
For more details or images contact:
media@australiangalleries.com.au australiangalleries.com.au
How does your work address the theme ‘To the Edges’?
For myself, this has been a very apposite theme for a number of reasons. The initial reason being direct experience of the bush fires in 2019/2020. I live on a hundred acres in remote NSW South Coast and watched the sky turn a livid brown and the sun turn an angry orange as the flames from the Currowan Fires crept closer, until we were surrounded and parts of our land a-flame. Myself, husband, dog, were literally ‘on edge’ for days and nights with fire hoses out, water pumps on and waking every couple of hours through the night to check that fallen and smoking trees had not re-ignited and started a fresh fire. So the first piece in the trio deals with this aspect of the theme.
The second piece ‘Chaos’ suggests that humanity’s greed, carelessness and poor behaviour has lead to chaos and disaster – a theme influenced by Mario Vargas Llosa’s book ‘The Storyteller’ – and here we see flood, fire, calamity inflicted on the world. Finally, man’s poor environmental record has brought man and planet to the edge of extinction – sea levels have risen and imagined, monstrous sea creatures dominate …
Can you describe the technical process you went through to achieve the finished work and what technical challenges you encountered along the way?
Technically, the pieces were reasonably straight-forward, any difficulties tended to be in cutting the detail and ensuring clarity. Perhaps my choice of fibrous Japanese Unryu paper – chosen because I felt the woody fibres would enhance the message of the pieces – did make it harder to get solid blacks where I really needed them and as a result I did end up printing them all by hand.
What do you see as the role of Sydney Printmakers for the next 60 years?
Like other successful printmaking groups, we can show the great expressive possibilities of our craft, the wonderful images that can be achieved using only print techniques; that printmaking skills are great tools for everyone to use either alone or in combination with other media.
How do you see the role of printmaking in general, contributing to the conversation about contemporary art practice.
Printmaking utilises numerous flexible and dynamic tools and can probably lead or assist art practice to move in a multitude of directions.
As a student at the National Art School in the 1960’s I was introduced to Taoist philosophy and discovered Indian tantric art. At that time, I didn’t realize the influence this would have on me.
After graduation I exhibited paintings and taught at TAFE for many years. Then I studied and professionally practiced Traditional Chinese Acupuncture for ten years alongside my art practice. Working with subtle energy systems of Five Element Acupuncture, naturally influenced my artwork.
Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s I worked as a stills photographer on documentary film and book projects with Aboriginal elders and began to see expression of that elemental energy in their stories, song-lines and country, this changed the way I viewed landscape.
Some photographic projects that personally influenced me were the documentary “Flight of the Windhorse” about the first Australian Himalayan hot-air ballooning expedition in Nepal in 1985 (my introduction to Tibetan Buddhism). Photo research and photography for the book “Burnum Burnum’s Aboriginal Australia – A Traveller’s Guide” produced for the Bi-Centenary in 1988. The documentary “Kakadu Man” about Bill Neidjie, of the Bunitj clan Gagudju language group of northern Kakadu in 1990. (he invited me back to draw and paint his country).
In 1992, two favourite assignments as photographer were for the Sydney visit of the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet and photographing the handover ceremony for the remains of Mungo Lady at Lake Mungo, both in 1992.
Lake Mungo, like Kakadu, became a place that draws me back and I have produced and exhibited paintings, drawings, etchings and photographs from these places over the years. I always took a sketch pad, pencils, inks and crayons with me to sketch during breaks from photographing. Back home in the studio, many paintings, works on paper, experiments with etching and chine-colle came about because of these projects and journeys. Initially I worked with painting, printmaking and photography as individual practices, now I equally enjoy mixed media.
In 2000, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory included me in their exhibition “Artists in the Field: A Retrospective’ and bought one of my drawings for their collection.
In 2001, the Manly Art Gallery and Museum presented a survey show of my work based on 13 years of desert journeys called “Alchemic Wilderness: a survey 1988 – 2001- Lake Mungo, Desert and Kakadu”. It included photographs, drawings, etchings and paintings. They acquired an etching for their collection.
I decided to investigate Tibetan Buddhist ideas of the Five Elements as a portal into concepts of landscape, (including Australian Indigenous) for the Master of Philosophy, Visual Arts Graduate Program at ANU. I completed five bodies of work from landscapes as diverse as Lake Mungo (earth) Mystery Bay (water) Central Western Desert (fire,) Glasshouse Mountains (air) and Space as the fundamental basis of all the elements … inner space, outer space, the bardo, pictorial space, mind space. Chinese, Indian and Tibetan cultures have variations in their philosophical and visual traditions of the Five Elements. This was an opportunity to examine the diverse knowledge systems and spiritual practices I have engaged in over many years and explore how my Buddhist practice interfaces with the methodology of my art practice. I actively reviewed my painting practice as a contemplative art practice and investigated traditional and contemporary Australian, European and Tibetan artists. This research became part of my exegesis titled “Contemplation and Immersion: Exploring the Five Elements and Australian Landscape” awarded in 2020. My work is suffused with Buddhist philosophy and overlaid with environmental concern.
To see more of Carmen’s work go HERE.
Denise has lived and worked in Europe and has travelled extensively throughout Asia, but she has always returned to her home in Sydney. After completing a B.A. in Visual Art from COFA in 1983, she continued her art practice, moving from painting and drawing to printmaking, (specifically etching) over the last 15 years.
Her work is figurative and narrative in style and draws inspiration from her travels and the art that she had seen during those travels. She has taken particular delight in, and has been inspired by, the work of artists such as Pieter Bruegel and William Hogarth. She finds further inspiration in the world around her and uses various narratives to explore ideas, feelings and emotions.
Her most recent etchings are strongly influenced by the purchase of land in the country and, while still populated by people, the images explore the bush, its landscape, iconography and symbolism.
Please visit the Artist’s page to see the range of her work: https://sydneyprintmakers.com.au/portfolio/denise-scholz-wulfing/
Denise describes her Practice:
My printmaking practice has developed over the years as I have refined my etching technique. My approach to etching is traditional, working with copper and zinc plates, and acid or ferric chloride. After applying a hard ground to the plate I then scratch the image onto the plate, I do this many times to develop the line work and in doing so the tonal contrast of my images. I then refine the image by adding aquatint to increase the tonal value. Generally, I work in black and white or sepia on a cream paper for the drama, contrast and clarity that this brings to my prints.
For me etching is the ideal tool to develop my drawn ideas. I have long admired the work of figurative artists who are moral or social and commentators. These artist/printmakers such a Pieter Bruegel, William Hogarth, William Blake and Francisco Goya, use drawing as a central part of their practice creating ‘stages’ on which their characters play. Often inspired directly by these artists I reference Biblical or mythological stories and combine them with personal imagery to give my etched images an extra dimension.
Over the past few years I have increasingly used the landscape and natural environment as a metaphor for issues which are foremost in society, such as climate change and environmental degradation.
I continue the search for the ideal combination of subject and form, experimenting lately with collaging and reworking old prints into mixed media constructions.
Sharon was born in Apartheid South Africa, studied at Reading University and The Slade, University of London, and immigrated to Australia in 1982.
She is primarily a Printmaker, although she also paints and does black and white photography. Her work is representational and it is about issues, some private and some public. She tries to depict universal issues by showing them from her personal viewpoint. Her prints are influenced by her black and white photography and by old photographs. Her photographs are influenced by printmaking and painting concerns.
She has been a member of the Sydney Printmakers since 1994, exhibiting with them at least annually. She has had a few one person photography exhibitions, the last being Time Exposures: 60 Life Portraits in 2013.
You can see Sharon’s work on the Artists page at https://sydneyprintmakers.com.au/portfolio/sharon-zwi/
Here, Sharon talks about her practice :
I work in both photography and printmaking and the two feed on, and influence, each other. In more recent times I have been using a tablet and drawing onto a screen with a stylus. I have the images printed by a master printer with whom I discuss the best way to print my work, and which archival paper to use. Sometimes I work in purely in printmaking; other times purely with photography; and sometimes I combine both streams of my work.
Mostly, my work is about people, but visiting Oratunga Station, in the Flinders Ranges, in 2019 when I participated in the JMCCCP (JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice Winter School), gave me an opportunity to work on landscape images. The landscape of the Flinders Ranges was very different from the coastal and city landscapes I’m more familiar with, and this inspired me to try a very different kind of work, which I am still experimenting with.
Photoshop allows me to work in a very similar way to that of screen printing, especially when I use layers. I can get a huge range of effects, textures, and colours with Photoshop, and use a range of drawing or painting ‘tools’ which give a vast range of mark making effects. It is not a mechanistic way of working, and I do not use the ‘special effects’, which can give a uniform feel. It is no more mechanistic or ‘tricksy’ than any other method of printmaking, despite some peoples’ argument that it is. It is a modern printmaking method that I employ and experiment with, and I find it suits the work I am trying to make.
How does your work address the theme ‘to the edges’?
The work is representational but is made reductively, focusing on the shapes, spaces and atmosphere connecting the subjects. The edges are only created through a removal of what’s between. Broadly, the print explores how we interconnect with our surroundings and the veil that exists between what we perceive as ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. At a time where the world is on the edge of a precipice, an awareness of this divide, leading to a more holistic vision of ‘nature’ is perhaps our only salvation.
Can you describe the technical process you went through to achieve the finished work and what technical challenges you encountered along the way?
Recently I’ve made a few works burnishing aquatints and working reductively. I heavily darken the entirety of my plates with an aquatint then work back into them with scrapers and burnishers smoothing the surface texture of the plate like a traditional mezzotint. Previously I’ve taken care with the technique and aimed to achieve a softness a finesse but for this image I worked quickly using only large scraping tools hoping to achieve a sense of physicality and movement in the final marks and a sense of tactility in the removed areas of the plate.
What do you see as the role of Sydney Printmakers for the next 60 years?
Sydney printmakers has an important role bringing together printmakers and continuing to provide opportunity for connection and discussion amongst members and the printmaking community. The organisation provides a distinguished platform for printmakers to present themselves as a united front and grants access to unique and exciting exhibiting possibilities. The role of the Sydney Printmakers in disseminating printmaking into the public sphere continues to be of vital importance.
How do you see the role of printmaking, in general, contributing to the conversation about contemporary art practice?
Printmaking is an art practice inherently linked to technologies. From the most primitive forms of mark making to the utilisation of cutting edge technology, under its skin printmaking is a rolling commentary on the progression of how we communicate and how we make marks on each other. The role of printmaking in contemporary art practice is strong and I believe it really can only get stronger as it’s horizons widen and it’s playing field naturally becomes larger.