Gary was born in Brisbane where he received private tuition under the late David Fowler. He also trained in illustration and has worked extensively in this field. His training and involvement in the graphics industry are evident in his use of colour and composition.
Beginning with his first one-man show in 1971 in the Harry Dunwell Gallery, Rowes Arcade, Brisbane, Gary has held over 45 successful one-man showings, including Shanghai and Brighton, UK. His works have been purchased for private, corporate, and educational institution collections across Australia and many overseas countries.
Currently he is represented in galleries across the eastern States including Tasmania. He exhibits on a regular basis with Kevin Hill as a Top Ten Australian Artist. He is an exhibitor and visiting tutor at Sydney Art School and occasionally tutors for various Art Societies as well as from his own Studio.
Gary has attained many awards over the last 50 years and most recently, he has been a finalist in the Clayton Utz, Hornsby, and the Sunshine Coast Art Prizes. Gary is a full-time artist residing in Maleny in Queensland’s beautiful Sunshine Coast Hinterland where his family dates back four generations.
Saturday 14th & 28th October 2-4pmTicket Cost: $20 members and $30 non-members. These wine and cheese events will be a chance to hear the artists, entrants and key individuals talk about their artwork and their art practice.
Congratulations to all the recipients of the Petrie Terrace Gallery Awards. Each Selector for the Salon des Refuses has chosen a work to receive this award. Visitors have also voted and chosen the Peoples Choice award.
Selected by Lizzie Reik
Portrait of a Queer Father as Icon
by Jeremy Plint
SELECTORS COMMENTS
Plint’s self-portrait immediately stood out to me. It’s deeply personal, its challenging, and it’s also familiar. What comes to mind is the ‘mother and child’ imbedded in art history, juxtaposed with that exaggerated masculine character from the movies – the ‘bad guy’ sitting in the loungeroom with a gun.
He looks at the viewer defiantly, showing that these symbols – the tiara, the floral chair, the gun, the tattoos, don’t have to inherently belong to separate identities.
Plint’s work is strong technically, and it is also thought-provoking – it makes us want to know more about the sitter, but also makes us reflect on our own preconceptions about others, and how we construct and constrain identity.
Selected by Dr Kay Kane
Purple
by Purple Chang
SELECTORS COMMENTS
Purple Chang
This self-portrait evidences a relentless intensity of looking and seeing. The viewer cannot help but gain a very real sense of the perceptiveness of the artist and thus the character of the subject.
I see here a soul laid bare, achieved through masterly use of the medium. Colour harmony, composition and exposition of edge are so well-ordered that to change anything would be, in my view, to spoil the whole thing. I will say no more except to quote one of Australia’s best contemporary writers on art, Christopher Allen:
“Talk is cheap in art, and the only ideas that have true weight in painting are those that have been fully assimilated and realized in the very handling of the subject matter and the shaping of the imaginary world, such insights reaching deep into the mind of the viewer.”
Congratulations Purple.
Selected by Laura Brinin
Self-portrait in the Morning
by Leo Liu
SELECTORS COMMENTS
Shadowing, dripping washes of colour alongside heavier brushstrokes of thicker paint and a relatable facial feature of discerning one’s own creative work strike the viewer with a real sense of witnessing a realistic and at once exaggerated version of a studio environment. The skill and dedication of Zheng Liu’s creative practice are evident in the paint application, witnessed with the mix of expressive marks, controlled shadowing and the use of colour to sway the timbre of the work. The self-portraiture genre is a sometimes damning and at once celebrated revelation of how an artist views themself; in this instance, the subject appears to be nonplussed with their creative results, looking upon their work with a critical but experienced view. A resigned stance, along with the title suggesting an early-rising and committed practising artist, adds volumes to the relatability of the piece for many viewers and artists alike.
Congratulations to all the artists selected in the 2022 Salon des Refusés, run in conjunction with the Brisbane Portrait Prize.
Exhibition on show at Petrie Terrace Gallery from Thursday 6th October – Sunday 6th November 2022
Opening Night is sold out, but get your tickets to our wine and cheese afternoons here. To find out more about our selectors click here.
Anna (Lady ‘C’) Leigh Schoenheimer Tired Chris England Queen of Drama Lindy Mackintosh Merging Worlds of Clairy Laurence Bronwyn Doherty Tarcisio Carol Oh Just a Moment Timothy Grey Muse in green Marijke Lambregtse Poet and Dog (Anthony and Benny) Julie Manning Stable Table Robyn Moon Monique Kirsty Dixon Art + Music = an interesting life Linda McInally 2021 Isolation and exhaustion Margaret Bending A Journalistic Researcher Christine Hall 5:19am Kirilee West Liz Preston: “Grandmother” to many Graham Preston Lounge Art Jo McFadyen Selfie 2022 Justin Buchner Damien Power Alison Mooney All That Glitters Elizabeth Barden Nature Nutures Nurse Lynne Day Outcomes of Introspection De Gillett Cox To Joh Sangeeta Mahajan Purple Purple Chang “I can’t wear yellow…” Carol Goodwin Born in the Year of Tiger Nam-Trung Nguyen Lost but now I’m Found Laine Walker Dylan Stephen Tiernan Seize the Clay Tania Carmichael Johnny in the Studio Min Jia Johnny Huang The Conduit Kris Anderson Portrait of Dr Andrew Amey Brett Poulsen Lingering Hannah Brouard The Show Must Go On David Wells Patience Cameron Seymour Andrew + HB4 Andrew Weil Camila Monique Baques The Profound Void of an Empty Stomach Charlotte England Steph Nadya Constantinidis Lighting up Change Carla Benzie Dr Young Zhi Peng Wu Nina Ginsberg and Leki The Flower Bike Dr. Ekaterina Strounina Buckley Mr. Casey Charles Floating Mind Reece Woodland Next Gen Claudia paints Keith, Emerging to Established Donna Gibb The Enabler Samantha Groenestyn This is Me. Self Portrait. Monica Batiste Decisions, Decisions…What Shoes Will I Wear Jamie Congdon Jamie Simon Brown The Colour Behind the Uniform Melanie Kilby Portrait of a Queer Father as Icon Jeremy Plint Marcel Daniel Butterworth Calming the Mind Wendy Fry The Bubblegum Blazer Amy Knie Buckley Natalia Bertelli Self-portrait in the Morning Leo (Zheng) Liu Unfinished Business Annette Raff Lineage Nicola Hooper In Her Eyes Amy Bridge
We are delighted to introduce to you our selectors, who have the unenviable job of choosing the finalists for the Salon des Refusés.
With so much talent on offer it isn’t easy and we appreciate their professionalism and expertise when faced with the daunting task of selecting approximately 60 works out of over 300.
Lizzie Riek
Lizzie Riek is the Collections and Curatorial Officer at Redland Art Gallery and has experience working in public and university galleries. Beginning her arts career with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Printmaking) at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Lizzie has gone on to recently complete a Master of Museum Studies at University of Queensland (UQ), and is currently undertaking a PhD (UQ) on contemporary archival art practices.
Dr Kay Kane
RQAS Fellow and former President, Kay completed a fine art degree at Central School of Art, London, in 1981, and has thereafter exhibited in international and local galleries, including solo exhibitions. She has long been active in the art world, conducting many workshops and has extensive experience judging art awards, including one in New York in 2017. Kay is an experienced portrait painter and her work is represented in art collections in Australia and internationally, and has been hung in many major Australian exhibitions. She has been twice winner of the Harold and Agnes Richardson Art award and received several first prizes including the prestigious Queensland Figurative in 2016, and was a Salon Des Refusés winner in 2021.
Laura Brinin
Laura Brinin is a Brisbane-based curator of contemporary art. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) in 2012 and continued her visual art practice overseas in 2013 in Canada with a Visual Art residency. Upon returning home, Laura has since pursued professional curatorial practice at QUT and Side Gallery in Red Hill. Laura has exhibited her own work both in Australia and overseas and as an independent freelance curator across Brisbane. This primarily focussed on engagement and activation of public spaces, as well as consulting for private interior collections. You can find her most days reading, playing with her sausage dogs, and visiting art galleries.
Congratulations to all the artists selected in the 2022 Salon des Refusés, run in conjunction with the Brisbane Portrait Prize.
Elisabeth spent her early years in Barcelona where she dabbled in drawing and painting from an early age. As an adult Elisabeth continued developing her art with watercolours at the Queensland Watercolour Society. She soon found that this didn’t define her as an artist and furthered her formal training at Brisbane Institute Art and Bremer TAFE focusing in painting in oils and acrylics.
Her first solo exhibition was at St Stephens Gallery, Brisbane City Hall in 2000.
Elisabeth likes to use her work in aid of community support exhibiting for Life Line, Mitchelton Community Centre, Qld Police Services, St Steven’s Catholic Gift Shop, View Club and Brisbane Ethnic and Multicultural Arts Centre [BEMAC].
Her style, expressionist abstraction, is meditative and at the same time energetic. It derives from observed reality and never looses all contact with it. Themes and locations are entwined so that everyday life is, not only urban, but also a mystical experience.
“Art has been art of my life for as long as I can remember, and I have been oil painting for at least 60 years, on and off, with breaks of 10 years or more.
Now I am retired it is my passion.
I love painting Light and Portraiture, so many of my current paintings are Faces sculpted by Light. All my paintings are experiments, attempts to resolve problems, and when the experiment has concluded I move on to another challenge.
I paint Fast because that’s a side effect of my technique. Fast is good because I can experiment more!
I paint what I want to paint and refuse most commissions; if Art becomes Work – I am not interested.
Ultimately, I paint because I Must and sometimes it’s good and sometimes bad, but always a great pleasure, and right now that is what drives me :)”
The Royal Queensland Art Society would like to congratulate all the winners in the 2022 Queensland Figurative Exhibition, part of the RQAS Biennial.
Thanks also to our Judge Ben Smith.
Please scroll down to view the winning artworks and judges comments.
First Prize
Dad at Home
by Greg Jessup
JUDGES COMMENTS
Conveys the high regard the artist has for his father and how their psyche both pervades the space and stands in wonder of it. An incredible, mad work with overwhelming sense of life. Deft lively brush marks on the figure. Playful colours in the skin tones. This is not just photorealism. Beautifully composed. I feel like various elements of the surrounding foliage have been manipulated to keep your eye within the picture frame. The background elements push the figure forward. An image that shocked me with its intensity the moment I saw it.
Second Prize
Patron Saint of Adventure
by Samantha Groenestyn
JUDGES COMMENTS
This is a highly original composition. You can see that every shape and form, each placement of an object in this picture has gone through the filter of a human mind. Very idiosyncratic. Who would have thought a bike on a shoulder would work so well. Love the light from behind. A lovely feeling of warmth and regard for the sitter.
Highly Commended
Oneness
by Anne-Marie Zanetti
JUDGES COMMENTS
I have a lot of respect for people who go beyond trying to paint what is before them. It is far more difficult than people imagine. The technical problems to be overcome are often huge and if done well the effort isn’t always apparent to the viewer. A beautiful thoughtful idea.