These paintings are mostly views from our new home in the Capertee Valley.

Having lived without horses for over 30 years, I dreamed of one day being able to talk to them from my kitchen window as I had done from my grandparent’s house when I was a child. 

Last January I found just the wild horse who needed a home and so the search for a rural space began.

After much deliberation over leaving our well connected lives atop the Blue Mountains, we decided to take the plunge to the valley, with views all around to our beloved blue and orange splashed mountains. 

The challenges of off grid living, the need to paint with available light and a whole new change of priorities and focus forced a fresh perspective for these works. Having spent many years perched on the edges of cliff tops and painting what lay below, I now look upwards at the cliffs all around. It took

some getting used to but I have absolutely fallen in love with our place and am discovering treasures to paint every day.

We arrived at the end of a wet spring with the paddocks covered in wildflowers and singing with frogs. The long summer days ended in spectacular glowing sunsets and now the autumn grasses are blanketing the soil all around. I look forward to discovering the jewels of each season and trying to find the colours and brushstrokes that can do them justice for many years to come.

Rachel Hannan May 2023

In this, my second solo show for Day Gallery, you’ll notice several distinct threads or themes.

Firstly, I continue my popular “Yester Déjà Vu” series, an exploration of Red, Black & White. The series is now up to 9 works, only 2 of which are still available.

There are also several strong Op Art pieces, exploring shifting points of focus and the perception of movement.

I’ve also spent time since my last show here creating Architectural Abstractions. These echo the time in the early 1970’s when I first fell in love with Modernist Ideas & Art, while working as drawing office assistant on Harry Seidler’s plans for the iconic MLC Building. I was working in the wonderful Plaza Building, part of the Australia Square precinct. Surrounded by amazing art and great ideas, it was a time that shaped my life.

Lastly, I’ve revisited a couple of my older ideas with fresh eyes and larger canvas. Knowing the space here at Day Gallery has allowed me to paint on a bigger scale and be a bit bolder with my work, both opportunities I’m thankful for.  

The romantic notion of place is fully embraced by Johnny K in his latest exhibition of paintings. These sublime depictions of the Australian landscape are an evolution - the new vision emerging in the tradition of great Australian landscape painters.

Based on field trips out to Hartley Vale, Tarana, Kanimbla, Megalong Valley, Oberon, O’Connell, Bathurst and Orange, where the views are expansive and the horizons endless. Johnny’s work lures you into the landscape, as you stare into the distance and let your imagination run free to ponder the miracle and gift of life.

Johnny's bold colour palette and material choices, along with his unique technique and talent create a rare combination of beautiful contemporary art built on traditional foundations. These works are more than a depiction of the artist's love affair with the land. These are paintings of love - loaded with passion, emotion and positivity.

EXTENDED FOR ONE MORE WEEK!
FINISHING 29 September

Mie Nakazawa studied printmaking at the National Art School in Darlinghurst. She lives and works in Sydney.

Mie is interested in mark making though printing. She prints with confident and wandering lines that explore the many sides of a face. These faces are a combination of her own face and people she knows.

“I enjoy the physical element of making a print. Moving around heavy stones and paying attention to the mechanics of printing puts me in a meditive state.”

This selection of work is a collection of lithographs and monoprints from two different series, ‘Facade’ and ‘Same Same But Different’.

Free delivery. Framing can also be organised for an additional cost.

I have spent many years being a Plein Air painter, but this past year has meant a lot more time staying closer to home and the studio. So my studio practice is becoming more important to me. We did have a week away to the North West of New South Wales and I was particularly taken with the Pilliga Forest area. We went as always, in the Kombi, with 4 dogs in tow and I took gouache paints and drawing materials. The colours were amazing. A very different palette to the colours near my home in Lidsdale. There is something very special about starting a painting or creating a body of studies from the landscape. With my Plein Air painting experience, this is integral to my art. It’s time spent absorbing and experiencing the weather, the changes of light, the new places. I absolutely love it. I am always trying to simplify and pare back my paintings. So there has been much benefit from spending more time in the studio and reducing the shapes and colours from the studies and my memories to create this collection of paintings. 

Jane Canfield June 2021

This collection of work is all very recent. 

Flowers from my garden, friends and collected and observed from my local surroundings, gathered with objects from around my home were all painted from life. The favourite places I visit to feel alive and free were painted after many walks and picnics in the transformed landscape after the fires and rains. 

After the bewildering accumulation of events in 2020, I felt very fortunate to be living where I do and surrounded by the people I love. These paintings contain tiny, delicate beauties like the pink flannel flowers (Actinotus forsythii) and Christmas Bells (Blandfordia grandiflora) that miraculously bloomed after so much devastation had ravaged the vast wilderness of the monumental mountains and canyons, covering the newly bare landscape with their rarely seen colours. 

The big and the small of it, the balance of all things.

Rachel Hannan April 2021

Claire Nakazawa | Life is Peachy

“Painting for this show has been about re engaging the headspace of spontaneity, trusting intuition and encouraging the paint to lead.

It’s an exploration of colour, perspective and abstraction and the experience of making it was one of revelling in the joy, peace and liberating act of painting.
Life is Peachy is about enjoying the freedom and time to explore and play” Claire Nakazawa.

One of the greatest motivators in life for me is the movement of energy.
The more outlets for creativity and energy a person has, usually coincides with a healthy life.
Claire’s ability to create a positive energy that is directed into her work, whether it be through her music or her visual content is inspiring.
A pandemic has changed all of our lives. For Claire, her busy city life was swapped for a quieter country life.
Borders shut down and the impact on her music career was directly felt. She found that it was difficult to relax and be present.
After a period of time adjusting to a new pace, and completing a chapter in her music career, she was free to re engage herself and
create from her own self expression.
This body of work is a reflection of Claire’s aesthetic over the past five years, it is her returning to a more balanced healthy headspace and
sharing this beauty. I hope that you enjoy it!!
Vince Day.

Owen Thompson | New Terrain

This past year has taken me into new territory on my creative journey, where I have discovered the meeting point of some artistic opposites.

The borders between drawing and painting have dissolved for me with exploration of new combinations of traditional and modern materials. New objects have been added to my natural collections, some man made, others burnt. The boundaries between still life and landscape have merged with one drifting into the other, and observation is joined by imagination.

The extremes of illusionism and abstraction no longer seem contradictory but complimentary, joined together in an ‘abstract realism’. This is new ground for me, and I invite you to share it.

Owen Thompson November 2020

Morgan Shimeld | Passage

Sculptor Morgan Shimeld describes his work as minimalist geometric abstraction. The meaning behind his work is a complex amalgamation of philosophy, history and industry. His current series Passage aims to convey the metaphorical act of transformation, a symbolic rite of passage which pays homage to the notion of personal and collective experience. Morgan’s signature single-piece sculptures often feature angled channels cut through the form’s dense body, giving a sense of space within containment. His sculptures incorporate cast, welded and fabricated bronze and steel, which undergo a highly technical process of addition and reduction of positive and negative space.

Influenced by both modernist and ancient monolithic architecture, as well as Minimalism and Formalism, Morgan’s sculptures give a natural sense of balance, strength and elegance to his chosen material.

Rosy Leake, Art Edit magazine, March 2020

Olivia Shimeld | Falling Leaves

With a background in electronic and temporal art, Blue Mountains-based artist Olivia Shimeld has found a way to give her paintings a uniquely digital aesthetic.

Her ethereal abstract landscapes, night skies and floral assemblages flash with vibrant neon colours layered atop one another, creating a depth of space reminiscent of a digital screen. Olivia uses high quality acrylic, oil and aerosol paints which she intuitively allows to drip and splatter onto her canvas. At once meditative and energetic, Olivia’s work asks for contemplation as it blurs material boundaries.

Rosy Leake, Art Edit Magazine, March 2020

This latest group of paintings is a record of Frank Boyle’s recent travels in Europe and India.

Whilst in Europe Frank visited Italy for the first time where he enjoyed people watching, looking for interesting figures both singularly and in groups to snap and sketch.

Frank then visited India where he has been many times before. This trip he mainly painted animal compositions.

Back home in his studio Frank took his time to create compositions from these experiences on his travels. Frank has also revisited phenomenon of solitude by placing single figures, or animals, in a landscape and attempts to explore the relationship between the two.

Creatures have always sat for me in my mind.

They latch onto me with their eyes and images start to form. I see them not just in their native environment, but can easily be transported to the far off lands that have populated my imagination since I was a little girl.

In this exhibition, I chose to represent a cross-section of those environments that have been foremost in my mind over the last year. Probably affected
by our current predicament, being restricted to home most of the time, my imagined spaces have become more intimate on the whole, although the odd swash-buckling monkey has found it’s way in somehow.

JANE STAPLEFORD, SEP 2020

Land is Emotional

I overheard the phrase ‘land is an emotional subject for farmers’, and I thought: ‘Yes, land is emotional.’ For me, land is not passive.
It responds to me as I paint; it lets me in, allows me to know more, as I immerse my- self. It openly displays its history and health. Land speaks with wind and heat and light and colour and texture and so many other voices; as a result, I experience painting as having a conversation with land, a dialogue, so I can both feel the land and feel the painted mark concurrently. ‘Feelings emerge out of sensory immersion in land, and those feelings can be processed as paintings’ (Matthews, PhD Thesis, 2015).

Rowen Matthews, March 2020

This solo show presents work made up to, and including, the COVID lockdown period depicting Gabrielles’ world before and after the bushfires and enforced isolation, and experimental paintings depicting a Brave New World that Jones hopes emerge from this period of enforced self-reflection and creative activity.  

The ancient Greeks believed that objects, plants, places and creatures possessed a distinct soul - a spiritual essence - which they called animism.

This new series of paintings is inspired by this idea of animism.  I have merged images from ancient Greek sculpture with flowers to express reverence for the ancient world.  The Greeks and Romans experimented with ways of representing the human body, both as object of beauty and of meaning.  The power of Greek and Roman female sculptures, combined with flowers, evokes both strength and beauty and therefore has lasting aesthetic value.

The erosion and disfigurement throughout the millennia does not diminish the beauty and resilience of these statues. By adding an embellishment of flowers I seek to imbue this lasting beauty with added meaning.

Jennifer Gabbay
June 2020.

‘I always strive to reduce and simplify and I am drawn to panels of colour’. Jane Canfield April 2020

Viewing of this exhibition will be:

Online | Postal Catalogue | By Private Appointment | Zoom/facetime

Please email the gallery if you would like a hard copy catalogue in the mail.

Artist statement
Living just west of the Blue Mountains in a little hamlet called Lidsdale, we were the first to see fires in September 2019. If only we knew what was to come. Now the land is recovering, paddocks are green and flowers are blooming as we come into an early Autumn. Nature is bouncing back and it appears to have learnt how to rain again, at least in some parts of the country, at least for now. Like many, I am very concerned with our environment and the impact of too many humans on this beautiful planet.

So, as I started some of these paintings just as the fires began in 2019, it is interesting to look back over the months of work and see the strange seasons. The snow, then the fires, the spring growth then the drought’s impact. A positive and negative see-sawing of weather and emotions.

Then there are the rest of the paintings for this exhibition. Like the climate, these works see-saw between current paintings and some works that came from 2012. My residency in Northern NSW, beloved dogs that have been part of my life, friends pups and still life’s from my beautiful historic home. My work is a diary of my travels and the environment around me. I find it exciting to see my paintings in one exhibition that span almost 8 years and the subject and development of my work.

I always strive to reduce and simplify and I am drawn to panels of colour. The linework comes and goes. In earlier works it is under the final layers of paint, in the latest, I sometimes draw back in or allow the basic structure to show, many becoming mixed media, using oil, conte, charcoal, pencil and sometimes a stick or the handle of the brush to make marks and often scumbling with almost dry brushwork to soften and reduce.
 

I hope that these works bring some enjoyment, some peace and in some, a reminder of the power of nature and that humans are really inconsequential. We need this planet more than it needs us.

OVERVIEW

A contemporary group show featuring new works by Ken Knight, Rowen Matthews, Jennifer Gabbay, Adriana Seserko, Neil Taylor, Shane Smithers, Jane Stapleford, Rachel Hannan, Gabrielle Jones and Nick Potts.

OVERVIEW

Rachel Hannan continually plays with more expressive and engaging ways to paint the things she knows and loves. Hannan is rarely content but mostly in a good way as it means she is always on the move, physically and intellectually seeking ways of representing people, places, objects and feelings.

In 2019 Hannan decided to devote time to experimentation and shifting out of her comfort zone. Hannan has little experience painting interiors and figures so she thought this was a good place to start.

‘It was scary and at times I felt empty and untethered. Halfway through the year the works looked static and lifeless. I felt stuck. In an attempt to rejuvenate my practice I returned to the landscape and all the freedom and exuberance that it offers. I broke open the walls and brought the outside into the intimacy of everyday, domestic scenes. The warmth and energy then began to flow’.

Many of these new works are a merging of a new passion for portraits and interiors with Hannan's expanding view of the magnificence of the Blue Mountains.

OVERVIEW

Beauty and the Apocalypse encapsulates the beauty in uncertain times via means of abstraction. Rather than escaping from uncertainty, the work emphasizes the fragile beauty found within uncertain moments.

Each colour compliments the other sublimely as they sit on the edge of the unknown. (Think; current state of the planet) The paintings are drawn from my subconscious and are non objective.

Our time here is not finite, and I choose beauty.

Harold David | 2019

OVERVIEW

Historical paintings, drawings and prints from 1820 - 1890

OVERVIEW

This body of work is an immersion into the Upper Blue Mountains and a celebration of the natural landscape. As the city reseeds and the air embraces the coolness of altitude the sunset become particularly beautiful.

It is in this medium point between day and night a play on light exists, Neil Tomkins in this series aims to capture this magic hour through paint as a translator. It is through movement that Tomkins discovery and probing for understanding first conceptualized. The development of a fragmented reality allowing for an openness that invites the viewer

As the last rays of sun drift over the highest peaks the works tell a narrative of an ancient ocean and mighty peaks of volcanic dust, Tomkins leaves the works as a voyeur allowing the audience to fill in the pieces and find connection through paint, form and memory.