Oils Archives - Page 4 of 10

Sally Spicer

1 February 2021
Artists, Australia, New Zealand & Oceania, Figures, Oils, Painting, Portraits, Realism, Watercolour

Sally Spicer’s portrait art is imbued with a vintage sense of drama, intrigue, and intimacy. Her pathos evoking images provoke simultaneously hopeful and wistful emotions. She recently described to us her approach to art.

The most important thing I have learned is to follow your instinct with your art. Critique from external sources is valuable, but you need to stick to your decisions if they feel right. I loved to draw from a very young age, favouring depicting people right from the start. I was really lucky to have incredibly supportive parents, who recognised my passion and helped to steer me in the right direction. My grandmother was a talented artist, as are my Dad and my aunt.

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Charne Christensen

1 February 2021
Artists, Australia, New Zealand & Oceania, Hyper Realism, Landscape, Oils, Painting

BRIEF MOMENTS

Charne Brent Christensen’s immaculate photo-realistic painting style does justice to the dramatic but serene landscape of the South Island. Blending the mists of the unknown with the hyper-realism of strong light on crisply defined mountain and lake scenery, he has developed a unique style which he shares with us here.

My art is inspired by the New Zealand landscape. I regularly take my eight-year-old dog Chow Chow on road trips around the South Island. I love to explore the countryside and every trip inspires a new creation. It’s as if the lakes and mountains beg me to capture them for one brief moment in time; so that they can be displayed in a loving home to remind us of their eternal beauty. I work full time, so I paint whenever I get the time - mostly on weekends. I have been driven to learn and develop my skills so that one day I can become known as an accomplished artist.

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Freeman White

1 November 2020
Artists, Australia, New Zealand & Oceania, Landscape, Oils, Painting, Portraits, Realism, Seascape

ANSWERING THE CALL

Born in the Hawke’s Bay, Freeman White started drawing before he started school, and enjoyed tremendous support from his parents. While still in primary school, Freeman was entering and winning art competitions, always serious about his artwork.

In the late 90s Freeman attended Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland for a year. “Their mantra was that ‘painting is dead’, but painting was very much alive for me, so I left after a year. After that I received a scholarship to study Honours at the Learning Connexion in Wellington where I met fellow painter Sandro Kopp.”

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Tracey Coakley

1 November 2020
Artists, Australia, New Zealand & Oceania, Figures, Hyper Realism, Oils, Painting, Portraits, Realism

Tracey Coakley’s narrative work explores the human emotions of mental health issues, growing up, pre-teen and understanding the transition from child to teenager and still retaining your own uniqueness. Using herself and her family as models.

“I love making art and exhibiting it. I’ve always been making art, creating and drawing, since I was a child growing up in Melbourne. I used to open-up paper shopping bags and draw murals. I had an amazing art teacher in the last two years of high school who introduced us to the world of art, not only in the classroom but also the occasional field trips from the country to city galleries and the National Gallery of Victoria and art lectures. It was always the subject I enjoyed the most and excelled in.

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Teissi Aranda

1 September 2020
Animals, Artists, Australia, New Zealand & Oceania, Impressionism, Mixed Media, Nature, Oils, Painting, Portraits, South America, Watercolour

HEALING POWER

Teissi Aranda is on the hunt for her global art tribe. After a serious accident forced her to reevaluate her values, she decided to study art full time to a postgraduate level and has never looked back. “I have found people along the way who support me and believe in me, and that is the most important thing.”

With works now located in Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, UK and USA, Teissi is a force to be reckoned with. She believes that art heals, that it connects you to your people.

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Natalie Gelder

1 September 2020
Artists, Australia, New Zealand & Oceania, Drawing, Expressionism, Figures, Nature, Oils, Painting, Portraits, Realism, Watercolour

PRECIOUS MOMENTS

In 2020, Natalie Gelder was a busy, pregnant mum with a two-year-old toddler. As a result, most of her art was created at night by the light of a daylight bulb. But the journey into motherhood has also given her a wonderful new subject matter, “one that I am full of love and enthusiasm for”.

Becoming an artist, for me, has been a personal creative development process from a young age. My biggest motivator was my dad. He encouraged me in the right direction as an artist, together with building a creative and supportive family environment. I started going to fringe art association meetings in England with my Dad when I was still really young, around 12 years old. I did AS level Fine Art straight out of school, and then two years of studying at art college from 2010.

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Mark Daniells

1 September 2020
Artists, Australia, New Zealand & Oceania, Featured Artists, Oils, Painting, Portraits, Seascape, Watercolour

EXOTIC ROOTS

Born in California, Mark Daniells grew up in the Federated States of Micronesia. While living there, his mother was a teacher and his father was a civil engineer and both were artists as well. He loved drawing during his youth and had ample time to explore the wildlife with his three brothers. Years later, after moving back to California and focusing on art, he graduated from the University of California Berkeley with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts with an emphasis on Print Making. He had acquired the additional skill of being a builder which helped sustain him for many years.

During his childhood, growing up in the islands of Micronesia, Mark was instilled with a sense of awe for natural beauty. Nature is the true master of design, shapes and colour. With his island roots he eventually moved to Hawaii where he lived for close to 40 years with his wife Diane. Being an accomplished builder he finally realized his dream of being a full time artist and opened Mark Daniells Gallery in the town of Hanalei on the island of Kauai, Hawaii.

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Sue Currie

1 November 2019
Abstract, Acrylic, Artists, Australia, New Zealand & Oceania, Impressionism, Landscape, Nature, Oils, Painting, Realism, Watercolour

Sue Currie was delighted to find that a comprehensive Australian correspondence course in graphic design for three years while at high school in Christchurch was a successful background for working in art. “In those days there were few opportunities for women to be taken seriously. In Sydney, Australia, the attitude was much more positive.”

Sue also took lessons with artist and illustrator Arthur Renshaw, (a retired tutor from the NSW Polytech), twice a week for six months as well as working freelance in graphic design. After six years she returned to New Zealand to paint, attending weekend workshops with a few fellow artists.

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John White

1 January 2017
Animals, Artists, Australia, New Zealand & Oceania, Birdlife, Featured Artists, Impressionism, Landscape, Oils, Painting, Realism, Vehicles

WILD PASSION

“Don’t be afraid, all the great painters had to start somewhere. You will make many mistakes so go ahead and start making them”. Adeptly using the time honoured mediums of oil and watercolour, John White portrays his love of wildlife through richly built paintings, softly painted, revealing the passion he has for his subject. Having built his skills over a lifetime he continues to create, advise and exhibit in New Zealand and overseas.

You know the first thing people ask me when they see my art is “how long have you been painting”? My answer is that I have always painted. I was brought up in a small place called Macandrew Bay on the Otago Peninsula with my three brothers and one sister. One of my brothers is my identical twin who is also an artist. We are the only ones in our family who do art, so my parents really did not understand what it was all about but they did encourage us. In my late teens I used to come home after playing rugby on a Saturday and paint watercolours on our kitchen table. If we had any visitors my mother would bring out my paintings and show them.

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Kristin Ivill

1 November 2016
Abstract, Acrylic, Artists, Australia, New Zealand & Oceania, Birdlife, Drawing, Featured Artists, Ink, Nature, Oils, Realism, Symbolism

JOINING THE DOTS

Written and photographed by John Botton.

I first met Kristin Ivill when she breezed into my studio clutching a portfolio folder full of artworks she wanted to get copied and printed. While pouring over her work, it took me some time to realise that the exquisite images were made of thousands of dots, dots of all shapes, dots of all sizes, dots of all hues. My only point of reference was to imagine that the dots were like pixels in a photograph. I went along to Kristin’s studio to see if she was indeed going dotty.

JB: “Give me a little background to your beginnings in art and your training?”

“I’ve always loved art. My mother was arty and my grandmother was quite crafty. She spun wool. She dyed wool and wove fabrics. My grandmother would take me around the farm and we’d go hunting for birds and bugs and look at the trees and she would tell me all about the native fauna and flora. So that’s where my love of birds and nature stems from. I did art at school until year eleven when my art teacher told me to give it up. She said I had no talent. So I stopped doing it and focused on art history in year twelve which I loved. That’s where I was exposed to Seurat who did pointillism. But that was the end of that so I left art and got married and had children. When my daughter was born I did a bit of painting again because we needed some art to fill the walls. I got some canvases and paint and just started painting and it went from there.”

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