Alice Pulvers

Alice was born in Tokyo, Japan and grew up in both Tokyo and Kyoto with her two younger sisters, also artists, and her older brother. She was educated in Japanese schools until she moved to Sydney in 2000 and is bilingual in Japanese and English. Alice began drawing and painting from an early age. When she was 15, she travelled to Paris, and the art she saw there made a lasting impression on her. This experience and her other travels have influenced her development as an artist. Alice has studied life drawing and has taken courses at the Julian Ashton Art School and at the College of Fine Art in Sydney. Alice exhibits her paintings regularly and has been a finalist in numerous art prizes, including the Portia Geach Art Prize, the Mosman Art Prize, the Kilgour Prize, the Ravenswood Art Prize and the National Capital Art Prize. She has been a semi-finalist six times in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and in the prestigious BP Portraiture Prize in London. Alice has also travelled in Germany, the UK, China and Singapore. The art she has seen on her travels has enriched her imagination, and her paintings are filled with images of air, water, animal and plant life. She recreates the strange relationships between the way we as humans experience our world and the forces of the universe acting upon our sense of reality. In Alice’s work, elements of naturalism, such as birds, fish, cattle and cats, appear in schematic landscapes. These are reminiscent of the way Japanese art flattens and arranges landscapes. Water birds appear frequently in her paintings. She has a fascination with these special birds, which can swim under the water, float on the water, walk on the land and fly in the air. In this way they transcend the forces of nature that confine many other living things, including ourselves