Artist of the month for May.

Featuring this months artists Kathleen Harding and Janet McInnes.

Impressionist: Kathleen is a local artist who has lived on the Northern Rivers for much of her life. She has a love for nature and finds inspiration in her tropical garden and surrounds.

Kathleen paints mainly in acrylics although uses other mediums to create and produce interesting outcomes making the work completely unique!

As a Monet fan, Kathleen loves the ‘impressionist’ style and has a love for water lilies. She won the ‘People’s Choice Award’ at the Bentley Art Prize in recent years and held her very own Solo Exhibition at Lennox Art Collective in 2019.

Mosaics: Janet has been making mosaics for 15 years, attracted to this form of artistic expression by the colour and texture of the medium. Having previously dabbled in patchwork and count thread cross stitch she was used to putting little pieces of colour together to create an effect. Mosaics took this to a whole new level. It is such a useful and durable art form as testified by works created many thousands of years ago by the Romans and Greeks.

She has been tutored from people around the world, with artists such as, Scott Harrower who mainly used glass and porcelain tiles and learned the Roman way of working. Progressing to the original source, Italy, where Martin Cheek, a UK based Mosaic Artist, led tours and taught in Venice, Ravenna, Sicily and England. With him she was able to learn new skills and gain inspiration from the wonderful mosaics in these places. This prompted her love affair with Italian Smalti.

Australia is not without its share of great teachers with Caitlin Hepworth, Marian Shapiro, Anna Minardo, Cetta Pilati and Brisbane based, Sandy Robinson. She has attended MAANZ (Mosaics Australia and New Zealand) Symposiums with being among fellow mosaicists also exhibiting.

Janet makes small works of fruit, flowers and birds. Larger works are usually landscapes, telling a story rather than expressing a feeling or mood.

Materials are whatever suits the story, like using found objects in amongst Smalti, Cinca (porcelain tiles), Marble and broken china. Mostly directly laid on to the substrate. Her work can mostly be placed outside depending on whether it is framed or unframed.

Passion creates possibilities.

Find out more HERE