Nora Heysen: A Portrait

Nora Heysen: A Portrait
Author: Anne-Louise Willoughby
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2019-04-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1925815218

Hahndorf artist Nora Heysen was the first woman to win the Archibald Prize, and Australia's first female painter to be appointed as an official war artist. A portraitist and a flower painter, Nora Heysen's life was defined by an all-consuming drive to draw and paint. In 1989, aged 78, Nora re-emerged on the Australian art scene when the nation's major art institutions restored her position after years of artistic obscurity. Extensively researched, and containing artworks and photographs from the painter's life, this is the first biography of the artist, and it has been enthusiastically embraced by the Heysen family. This authorized biography coincides with a major retrospective of the works of Nora and her father, landscape painter Hans Heysen, to be held at the National Gallery of Victoria in March 2019.

Womerah Lane

Womerah Lane
Author: Tom Carment
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2019-11
Genre:
ISBN: 9781925818215

Carment is one of Australia's best-known plein air artists. It is his distinctive mark as a writer that he writes as he paints - from life - capturing the likeness of a particular place in time, remaining faithful to the moment when he sees something striking or strange. And just as his paintings and drawings are small, limited by what he can carry with him on his travels, so in his writing he is a miniaturist working on a large scale: the tone of his writing matches the style of his brushwork. Free-flowing yet nuanced, it evokes the places he visits and the people and objects he encounters, friends and strangers, the homeless and the famous - farms, beaches, cottages, building sites, even typewriters and eggs and telegraph poles - each has its story. In this richly illustrated collection of Tom Carment's essays about people and landscapes has been thirty years in the making. It covers the period that he has lived in Womerah Lane in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, while travelling the country as a plein air artist. Womerah Lane is composed of written pieces set in every state of mainland Australia, accompanied by paintings and drawings made in those places. 'Tom Carment's writing, like his art, seduces quietly: austere, highly articulate, always fresh, with a dry sense of the absurd. In this calm, modest register he commands great territories.' -- Helen Garner 'Tom Carment's Womerah Lane is a lively and pensive personalhistory, chronicling 30 years of life and art from one of Australia's mostwell-known landscape artists...Womerah Lane isa rich study of contrasts, likely to appeal to readers with an appetite forAustralian biography, the arcane of the everyday and the many (sensory)pleasures of landscape artwork.' -- NathanSmith, Books+Publishing 'Inthese gentle paintings, drawings and stories drawn from three decades as a peripateticplein air painter based in Darlinghurst, Tom Carment evidences the lightesttouch and the keenest intelligence. An intelligence, it must be said, whosesecret lies in an eye-head-hand co-ordination which borders on the mystical.Yet Carment's writing is as aquarelle, as calligraphic, as deceptively simple,as his art.' -- The West Australian

Acute Misfortune

Acute Misfortune
Author: Erik Jensen
Publisher: Black Inc.
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2019-04-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1922231800

In 2008, the artist Adam Cullen invited journalist Erik Jensen to stay in his spare room and write his biography. What followed were four years of intense honesty and a relationship that became increasingly claustrophobic. At one point Cullen shot Jensen, in part to see how committed he was to the book. At another, he threw Jensen from a speeding motorbike. The book contract Cullen used to convince Jensen to stay with him never existed. Acute Misfortune is a riveting account of the life and death of one of Australia’s most celebrated artists, the man behind the Archibald Prize–winning portrait of David Wenham. Jensen follows Cullen through drug deals and periods of deep self-reflection, onwards into his court appearance for weapons possession and finally his death in 2012 at the age of forty-six. After much critical acclaim, Acute Misfortune was developed into a feature film, winning The Age Critics Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2018. The story is by turns tender and horrifying: a spare tale of art, sex, drugs and childhood, told at close quarters and without judgement. Winner of the 2015 Nib Waverley Library Award for Literature Shortlisted in the 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and for the 2015 Walkley Book Award ‘Erik Jensen is a Boswell or Vasari for our baffled, fractured, fucked-up times. Acute Misfortune is the most intimate, revealing, and original take on an artist’s life I know of.’ —Sebastian Smee ‘Erik Jensen gives us that ingenious place where biography is also art.’ —Jennifer Clement ‘This is supposed to be about an artist, a wild man, his lifetime, and it is; but Jensen has written such a beautiful window that all art and life is shining through. I'm supposed to be an artist but I cannot put this down.’ —DBC Pierre

Arvida

Arvida
Author: Samuel Archibald
Publisher: Biblioasis International Trans
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781771960427

Finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize Finalist for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award Like a Proust-obsessed Cormac McCarthy, Samuel Archibald's portrait of his hometown is filled with innocent children and wild beasts, attempted murder and ritual mutilation, haunted houses and road trips to nowhere, bad men and mysterious women. Gothic, fantastical, and incandescent, filled with stories of everyday wonder and terror, longing and love, Arvida explores the line which separates memory from story, and heralds the arrival of an important new voice.

The Royal Tour

The Royal Tour
Author: Vincent Namatjira
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-06-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781922545213

A Cheery Soul

A Cheery Soul
Author: Patrick White
Publisher:
Total Pages: 87
Release: 2001
Genre:
ISBN: 9780868196602

Reissue of a play first published 1965 as part of the collection 'Four Plays'. Lonely Miss Docker is taken in by a well-meaning couple with the best of intentions when she is left homeless, but the situation does not work out. She moves into a home for the aged, where she is met with a mixed reaction. Playwright was also a novelist, and one of Australia's most renowned literary figures. He was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature. Other titles include the novel 'The Eye of the Storm' and play 'Big Toys'.

Outback

Outback
Author: KEN. DONE
Publisher:
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN: 9781760760779

Rich reds, fuchsias, oranges, umbers, blacks, pinks and cadmium yellows abound in this ode to the Australian Outback. A delightful, compact package, Ken Done¿s Outback is one of four books in a collectable set exploring his most iconic landscapes.

BP Portrait Award 2015

BP Portrait Award 2015
Author: Neil Gaiman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: BP Portrait Award
ISBN: 9781855145658

The BP Portrait Award, now in its thirty-sixth year, is one of Britain's most prestigious art prizes, and is the leading showcase for artists throughout the world specialising in portraiture. In 2014 more than 280,000 people visited the exhibition based on the competition open to all artists aged eighteen and over from around the world. The catalogue features fifty-five works from an international list of artists, which together display a diverse range of styles and painterly techniques. It also includes an essay, an illustrated interview with the previous year's Travel Award winner and interviews with the prizewinners by Richard McClure, which give further insight into the artists behind the portraits.