Lane originally studied art at the National Art School in Sydney before he moved to the North Coast.  Says Lane: “What began, as a painting trip and holiday became a passion for landscape and seascape painting.”

In the late seventies Lane traveled overseas and spent a couple of years working and painting in London and Europe. “This gave me valuable experience in the European tradition and to this day, Monet remains one of my favorite romantic artists,” Lane says. “When I came back I settled in my home/studio in the hinterland of Byron Bay and have been working as a professional artist for the past thirty years from this base.”

Lane has won numerous prizes including the Canberra Times National Art Award, the Tamworth City Art Prize, The Saint Albans Art Festival Award and the Coffs Harbour Advocate Prize.

2015 Exhibition and Studio Sale
Exhibition opens Saturday 5th December 11am to 6pm
Then open daily 11am to 6pm until Sunday 20th December
David Lane’s Studio Gallery
31 Fernleigh Road
Tintenbar 2478
Preview available by appointment
Telephone David on 0428878139
Email: [email protected]
Visit David’s web site: www.davidlane.com.au
Contact David Lane on 0428878139

David Lane: Pond Lights, acrylic on Arches paper.

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Donna Sharam is well known for colourful, kaleidescopic paintings, and today, Sunday November 22nd she’s holding an open day in her Clunes studio.  The studio is open from 10.00am – 1.00 pm.

Says Sharam of her work: “I’ve always loved colour. From an early age I dressed up in the most colourful outfits, dyed my hair purple and wore different colour shoes. My infatuation with colour flowed into a career as a fashion designer and now manifests itself in my art. I live in a most beautiful part of the world – the rolling hills and rainforests of the Byron Bay hinterland are my home. My wonderful family, the quirky villages, amazing landscapes and eclectic mix of people ignite my passion to paint. The overwhelming sentiment of my art is my ‘love of life’.”

Details:

Donna Sharam Open Studio, 5 Wickham Place, Clunes.  Phone: 66291718 or 0401835 831

Order from the website: donnasharam

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Art prizes have long been seen as being effective in developing a regional art collection. Many regional galleries throughout the country owe their existence to the foresight of communities decades ago who identified an art collection as an important barometer of the healthiness of their city or town.

Lismore Regional Gallery is no exception, with our permanent collection being stimulated from 1954 with the hosting of the Lismore Art Prize. This story, eloquently told in 2004 by Rebecca Rushbrook – lismoregallery – makes for a fascinating history of the development of one of the state’s oldest regional galleries.

Lismore Regional Gallery continues to use an art prize as an important way to building this important cultural asset. The Hurford Hardwood Portrait Prize builds on the success of the Northern Rivers Portrait Prize, started in 2010. Contrary to many perceptions, this prize was always open to artists across the country, but was restricted to the subject having to have a connection to the Northern Rivers. This was recently changed, such that entrants now can enter portraits irrespective of the subject’s connection to Northern Rivers.

Andrew and Gaela Hurford (Hurford Hardwood) with Fiona Lowry in front of the winning work by Paul Ryan, Blue Mountains Noah (Noah Taylor).

What this has meant is that a greater range of artists are now entering, and significantly putting Lismore Regional Gallery, and this prize into wider recognition. It also means that the development of the collection is being more widely canvassed. In talking to some of the 40% of local artists who are in the prize, for them it also means that their work is being seen among a very different group of artists.

On Saturday 31^st October, 2014 Archibald Prize winner Fiona Lowry named Wollongong artist Paul Ryan as the winner of the Hurford Hardwood Portrait Prize with his portrait blue mountains noah – a portrait of Noah Taylor.

The painting is from an ongoing series of the London-based Australian actor, executed over found paintings. In this work, Ryan positions Taylor over a combined landscape of the Blue Mountains, almost imagining the actor in a filmic scene. Ryan has long been interested in the idea of Australian colonialism, the landscape, and the ongoing ramifications of white settlement. Ryan has been a finalist in the Wynne, Sulman and Archibald Prizes at the Art Gallery of NSW numerous times since 1989. The winning work will now enter the permanent collection of Lismore Regional Gallery.

Lowry also named Lismore artist Bryce Anderson as the winner of the ‘Northern Rivers subject’ category, with his painting Bathed in Doubt (Self Portrait). This $1,000 non-acquisitive award was sponsored by Walters Solicitors.

The winner of the People’s Choice Award, sponsored by the Far North Coast Law Society, will be announced on Friday November 27.

For more information go to: lismoregallery The exhibition is open until Friday November 27

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Wrencher, an accomplished North Coast artist, is placing the finishing touches to his latest collection of work for his forthcoming exhibition to be held at Sibella Court’s The Society Inc. Warehouse in Sydney as I arrive to talk to him.  From the outset visiting his studio in the Byron Bay Hinterland it is obvious friends, family and nature are essentially important to this artist; the 68 acres set on picturesque Friday Hut Road is home to Wrencher, his wife Jane and their four children and Wrencher’s brother Luke, his family and Wrencher’s parents also co-habit on this very special piece of land.

Wrencher loves working from his verandah studio which looks across the open land and way beyond to the Night Cap Mountains. “I like my studio being part of our home, part of our life,” he says. “I can paint when the inspiration moves me and then when I’ve finished or am between a stage of the work I can go and do some manual labour on the land and return. My art is not separate from my life – and it is not separate from me.”

Having lived in both London and Sydney Wrencher appreciates the unique splendour and tranquillity of the far north coast’s natural beauty, and as a surfer he values the ever changing moods of the seascapes which surround him. “Every day is different and the moods and light at each time of the day change on both the land and in the sea,” he says. “These differences form the layers and distinctions within each of my paintings. I paint in oils because for me they do justice to the depth of contrasts I see and feel.”

Charly Wrencher, Wish, oil on canvas, 2.00 x 1.5m

For Wrencher life is inspirational and he finds within his art, his family, community, surfing and his surrounding landscapes a unity that reflects, for him, the interconnectedness of everything.  “I leave nothing out of my paintings,” he says. “They explore all the emotions and the aim is to embrace all of what I see and feel. I don’t aim for life’s perfection in my paintings – I aim for resolution. Nothing is ever perfect but all elements can finally find some resolution – a completion before the next cycle begins.”

Wrencher uses cellular memory not photographs when he paints. His personal experience of the land and seascapes at every time of day creates a lyricism to Wrencher’s work, an evocative hum that consumes you if you stay long enough with each painting. Light, texture and mood change as your eye wanders across the entire landscape. Rich, layered oils of contrasting shades ripple with a magical lustre, then dive into darkness only to come back once more into iridescent light.

Viewing Wrencher’s paintings I felt as if I was peering into unseen territories within bushes and trees, hills and river beds and then into the magical expanse of the night sky reflected in the shadowy blue of a morning sea at Broken Head. Poetry can be transcendent  and Charly Wrencher is a poet with oils.

Wrencher told me that there’s a certain synchronicty with his art and that if he imagines something, he then often sees it. “Like this painting of the groper,” he tells me. “I imagined the groper first then within days I saw this beautiful groper while surfing at Tallow.” He also says that he likes to leave unfinished areas in his painting to draw the observer into an imaginative space of their own resolution.

I ask Wrencher if he has any advice for young artists. “Learn your craft, study, practice and refine your art,” he says. “You need the basics first – study them until they are a part of you and then find your own style and expression,” he answered. Having trained at Sydney’s National Art School, Wrencher  went on to spend years studying life drawing and working with other art mediums until he found his expression in painting with oils.

Charly Wrencher: Photo: Kim Carey

Before I leave, Wrencher and Jane invite me to take a closer look at their property. The land flows down through coffee bushes and trees to a stream complete with waterholes and waterfalls. As we walk, Jane points to an old Tallow tree  “We often get koalas nestling in the branches.” We all look up and laugh. There in the fork of a huge old gum tree a sleepy koala snuggles blissfully.

Right on queue Bodhi, the small and noble Lhasa Apso who guards and protects the Wrenchers home and family appears – smelly, brown and proud after rolling in cow poo. We laugh again. Life presenting life in all its perfect imperfections and this beauty and contrast of life is what Charly Wrencher captures in his paintings.

Charly Wrencher’s forthcoming exhibition is September 17 – October 10, at Sibella Court’s Society Inc warehouse, Suite 302, Precinct 75, Mary Street, St. Peters, NSW.

Charly’s work can also be viewed locally at Barebones Art Space, Bangalow and The Art Piece Gallery, Mullumbimby.

Visit www.charlywrencher.com.au

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Robert Ryan’s first exhibition on home soil in eight years, at the Lone Goat Gallery in Byron Bay, aptly titled Place of Dreams is a combination of intricately detailed canvases and four bold lined monotype works.

The canvases currently on display evoke the signature Ryan feels he has finally arrived at – particularly the piece entitled Belongil Fields, a complex mix of merging tones in green, white and yellow that run along the canvas in repeated pattern with no reference to beginning or end. From a distance, the viewer is lost in an abyss of green fields, it is only upon close inspection that the detailed labour of the work reveals itself. The painting took Ryan two months to complete, working eight to nine hour days in his studio six days a week.

“It drove me mad at times,” he says. He often regretted starting it but there was no turning back and the feeling of finishing this massive work was in his words “euphoric – like a natural high”. An approach he says is different to the way he worked in his younger years – ‘the more you learn the harder it is to walk away from a painting thinking that it’s finished, because now you know it’s not…”

Artist Robert Ryan. “The isolation can be extreme…” Painting: ‘Subdivision No 2’, 160cm x 180cm oil on canvas.

Despite the challenges Ryan experienced working through Belongil Fields, he rarely becomes frustrated when painting and saus hat treating it like a job can often make the process easier to tolerate. However, working as a full-time artist however often means long solo hours at the studio – and during the creative process the isolation can often be extreme, particularly in the lead-up to an exhibition. “It can often be a surreal experience being subject to so much time alone and then suddenly being in the spotlight,” he says.

Ryan’s introduction to painting developed when he was young, growing up in South Australia. He had a natural artistic talent which was quickly noticed by his teachers: “Art was something I was good at, people would look at it and fuss over it, that’s what made me continue,” he says. After school he studied at the North Adelaide School of Art – later renamed the Central School of Art.

As a seasoned traveler over the years, the focus of Ryan’s work is often influenced by the places he visits, a permanent residency set up at the Apollo Gallery in Ireland – for whom Ryan still paints – resulted in frequent stints to Dublin between 1997-2004, as well as surfing and painting trips through Indonesia and the Maldives. Often personal themes will emerge unintentionally and he is surprised at what the work will reveal without him anticipating a particular result. To draw attention away from something that may be particularly private, Ryan will often tweak the work and readjust its focus in order for the painting to steer itself slightly off course, the initial concept will regain the focus while the underlying themes blur in the distance or are distorted in symbolism.

Robert Ryan: ‘Hinterland’, oil on board, 68cm x 72cm

He gives no clue about the true meaning behind the work in Belongil Fiends, but states the title has nothing to do with the painting. I’m reluctant to delve any deeper so as not to encroach on his privacy, art, after all, is open to interpretation.

Ryan claims that intention always needs to be considered when preparing new work, stating that: “It might not be the reason to start a painting, but it’s certainly the reason to frame a painting.” In the past, preparing for three solo shows a year was typical, more recently however, Ryan has paired this down to one, opting instead to spread his time towards preparing works in other areas such as competitions as well as developing pieces for the Apollo gallery in Ireland and the Anthea Polson gallery on the Gold Coast.

Despite having had thirty-odd solo shows during his career so far that has seen his work in galleries such as Art House Gallery, Rushcutters Bay in Sydney, the Schubert Gallery on the Gold Coast and the European Parliament in Brussels, and awards such as the Tweed Regional Acquisitive Award on two occasions and the MacArthur National Prize award, Ryan feels that it’s only been in the last handful of years that he has finally come to claim his own signature through the works created: “When you’re young, you can’t help but be influenced by work that you admire, it’s only now, after 20-odd years of painting professionally that I’m starting to really get my own voice.”

 Robert Ryan’s exhibition is on at the Lone Goat Gallery until February 4. lonegoatgallery

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