SPACE : 1

TOWARDS VISIBILITY

Lawrie Groom & Jennifer Vandeleur

Exhibition dates. 18 - 29 Oct, 2023
Opening Reception : Thursday 19 Oct 2023, 6:00 - 8.30pm.

“Towards Visibility - an exhibition of oil paintings, etchings and typewriter art”

JENNIFER VANDELEUR

When painting or drawing Jennifer always has the subject present in front of her easel and never works from photographs.

Often, mostly using charcoal, she draws lithe, lively models at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere during the cold months of Paris winter. Some of these are included in her still life oil paintings after returning to Australia.

The New South Wales painter and sculptor, David Andrews, was her tutor and remains a great inspiration, together with Caravaggio, Balthus, Egon Schiele, Edward Hopper, Giorgio Morandi, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard.

The task of an artist is to express subjectivity, to translate a personal view of the world. It is also to ponder the constant question of whether beauty develops out of form, or whether form develops out of beauty.

LAWRIE GROOM

Lawrie Groom is an expressionist artist whose work is characterised by simplified but exaggerated abstract form. Lawrie’s pictures illustrate his interest in silhouettes, the power of the long, single, continuous line that captures the essence of an emotion, mood or situation, and how brush strokes and colour change the temperature of a work.

His typewriter art (inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s visual poems and Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrammes) expands Lawrie’s verse into shapes to be seen, said out loud and studied, simultaneously; where the rhythms of syllables are enhanced with shapes and silent spaces.

Influenced by Maurice Denis, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sydney Long, Amedeo Modigliani, Odilon Redon, JMW Turner and Fred Williams, Lawrie studied art criticism at the VCA and enjoyed en plein air painting with John Yule, and drawing with Graham McKenzie at RMIT, Martin Yeoman in London and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris.