Collection Thirty Two | The Tapestry of Me

One of Alice’s great loves is the natural world which we experience in all its many manifestations. In her paintings, Alice gives expression to her personal desire to weave together the ideas that come to her through her longstanding interest in the way we think about time and space and in the way we all experience our ‘real’ world which can sometimes also seem almost like a dream - water flowing, fish swimming, wind blowing the clouds across a blue sky - as well as the mysterious phenomenon of consciousness as we and all living things around us live out our lives.

Art writer and author Anna Johnson has been painting for two decades yet held her first one woman show in 2022 in rural NSW. Her decision to work on a large scale made the necessary break from home to studio and her commitment to painting is now full-time. A third-generation painter and colourist, Johnson works with her own lineage (of colour field and gestural abstraction) and the more radical facets of Post Impressionism.

I am interested in creating paintings which explore my ongoing fascination of the Australian landscape in all its form.
My paintings reflect my love of both the interior and coastal presence of the country. The landscape invariably seduces, triggering a sensory, painterly response in my practice. Like the land itself, so too a work unfolds over time.
Often a work will sit in my studio for up to several years before it is released to the world. I endeavour to catch it unawares!
Of course the usual suspects of line, color, the painterly surface, composition and importantly, pictorial space are my ever present friends.

Emma Magenta is an Australian artist, writer and filmmaker and began drawing and writing her observations of the inner and outer worlds down on paper book bags and pinning them to the wall at Berkelouw Books, Paddington where she worked for 10 years. She was offered an international book deal at the front desk and has illustrated, written and published 7 books, and an award winning animation and live action film.
Emma is inherently inspired by nature, mythology and the world view of the child and primarily draws with her opposite hand to bypass the left brain, to achieve a naive style. Moving into painting is a deeper exploration into the power of symbolism, colour and text to evoke simultaneously, the feeling body and the mind of the viewer around matters of consciousness, spirit, nature and memory.

Eva Beltran is a Sydney based artist. She has an expressionist approach to subjects, aiming to depict an emotional experience more than a physical reality. Her work explores landscapes and memories through abstract figurations where intricate perspective is conveyed through linework variations and layers of paint. These storytelling paintings often incorporate symbolic elements.
Eva's works have been selected as finalists in several art prizes over the years, including the Glover Art Prize (Evandale, TAS); the Paddington Art Prize (Sydney, NSW); the Mosman Art Prize (Sydney, NSW); the Kilgour Art Prize (Newcastle, NSW); the Lethbridge Landscape Art Prize (Brisbane, QLD) and the Fleurieu Biennale Art Prize (McLauren Vale, SA).

Lucy’s paintings are all, in essence, an exploration of the inner emotional life of human experience. Lucy uses geometry, strong colour and bold lines to give her works an emotional power. These elements of colour and line are woven together to synthesize a surface world through which she aims to capture a moment in the inner life of the figure portrayed. Lucy was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan, and Japanese aesthetic culture has had a major impact on her work as an artist. In much traditional Japanese portraiture, the face and hands are the elements that give expression to the inner life of the figure and are often essentially drawings. The clothing of the figure, however, can be full of volume, geometry and colour. Lucy is also fascinated by Kabuki theater, where emotional climaxes in the drama are often expressed by a frozen moment or ‘mie’ in which the actor poses motionless but with extreme energy , bathed in dramatic lighting so the whole theatre holds its breath in the moment.

Sophie was born and grew up in Japan, mostly in Kyoto, surrounded by Japanese visual culture, both ancient and contemporary. Sophie continues to be a frequent visitor to Japan. Sophie has a university background in environmental science and like the Japanese Edo-period artists, she is fascinated by the natural world, which is almost exclusively the subject of her paintings. Sophie weaves together the elements of colour and design to highlight the essential character of her subject. Even when Sophie’s subjects are not drawing inspiration from a specific Japanese work, they always utilise the visual language of Japanese two-dimensional representation in art, which is very different in its fundamentals from the European tradition of naturalism in art.

Sue Tesoriero is a painter based in Sydney’s Inner West. Sue holds a bachelor’s degree in visual communications from Sydney College of the Arts (UTS). She has studied fine art part time at the National Art School, the Wiesbaden Fachhochschule in Germany and Art Est Art School.

Both Sue’s Interior and still life works embody the sacredness of objects; attaching meaning and relationships to the things we hold dear, conjuring memories of people, places and time. Sue works mostly in oils.

Sue has exhibited works in group shows both locally and abroad as well as a solo show at AK Bellinger Gallery in 2020. Sue’s work was recently a finalist in the 2022 Bowral Still Life Award, 2021 National Emerging Art Prize, 2020 MWAP – Meroogal Women’s Art Prize and 2019 EMSLA - Eutick Memorial Still Life Award. In 2018 at the Glebe Art Show her work was Highly Commended and was awarded the winner of the People’s Choice Award.