Pulvers Family - BROCADE

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

Lucy was born in Kyoto, Japan and grew up in both Tokyo and Kyoto with her two older sisters, also artists, and her older brother. She was educated in Japanese schools until she moved to Sydney in 2001 and is bilingual in Japanese and English. In 2014 she was awarded the Thea Proctor Scholarship by the Julian Ashton Art School. She paints in both oils and watercolour. Lucy recently spent a year in the UK and travelled in Europe, spending time particularly in Germany. This was an intense period of looking at art, as well as painting and drawing while living in London. Every year since 2019, her watercolour paintings have been selected for inclusion in the annual Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours exhibit in London. In the 2020 watercolour exhibition, a self-portrait was awarded the ‘President’s Choice Award’. In 2024, Lucy received the ‘Anthony J Lester Art Critic Award’. In April 2025, was elected to be a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, founded in 1831.

Lucy exhibits regularly and has been a finalist twice in the Portia Geach Portraiture Prize, a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize, a semi-finalist in the BP Portraiture Prize in London and, more recently, a finalist in the Blake Prize and twice a semi-finalist in the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award in London.

Lucy is essentially a figure painter and portrait artist. All of her artistic work is rooted in her relationship to line and drawing as the foundation of her paintings, both in watercolour and oils. Her paintings are all, in essence, an exploration of the inner emotional life of human beings. She uses geometry, strong colour and bold lines to give her works an emotional power. These elements of colour and line are woven together to synthesise a surface world that captures a moment in the inner life of the figure portrayed

Sophie was born in Tokyo, Japan and grew up in both Tokyo and Kyoto with her two sisters, also artists, and her older brother. She was educated in Japanese schools until she moved to Sydney in 2001 and is bilingual in Japanese and English. She continues to be a frequent visitor to Japan and recently visited Tokyo to open a three sisters exhibition at the Kobo Chika Gallery. Sophie has always been fascinated by the natural world and this is reflected in her work, in which she most often paints animal subjects. Her work reflects the experiences of her childhood growing up surrounded by both traditional and contemporary Japanese art. Much of Japanese cultural and artistic inspiration is drawn from the natural world and natural materials. Sophie has travelled overseas as well as in many parts of Australia. She studied environmental science at the University of NSW. Some of the extraordinary places where she was fortunate enough to visit and experience wild nature include tropical far-north Queensland, the Corner Country of far-western New South Wales and Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia.
Sophie exhibits regularly and has been a semi-finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize, Hunters Hill Art Prize and the Waverly 9x5 Landscape Prize.

As well as painting animal subjects from life, Sophie has reinterpreted the animal subject etchings and paintings of the 15th/16th-century German artist Albrecht Dürer. She has also created a series of large works inspired by renowned Japanese artists such as Ito Jakuchu, Maruyama Okyo and artists of the Kano School.

In 2025, Sophie was commissioned by a Sydney school to create a large mural of a corroboree frog in its alpine environment.