Week 1: Jiawei Shen  

Lecture - Thursday 5 July, 6 - 7pm
Masterclass - Friday 6 July, 9.30am - 12.30pm

 

Jiawei Shen was born in China where he grew up under the Communist regime and gained recognition as an artist in the mid-1970s. Largely self-taught at first, when he was able to undertake formal art training in Beijing he was significantly influenced by his teacher Shangyi, China’s most famous portraitist. He came to specialise in history paintings and saw his works hung in top public collections in Beijing before moving permanently to Australia in 1989 in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In the three years after first migrating to Australia he sketched around 5,000 portraits of tourists from his makeshift stall on the pavements around Sydney’s Darling Harbour. This activity did little to indicate his former artistic status in China. Since then Shen has been a regular finalist in the Archibald Prize and in 1995 won the Mary MacKillop Prize with his portrait of Australia’s first saint. Working on eight to ten portrait commissions a year, Shen is well-represented in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, with his portraits of Hon. Tom Hughes QC, HRH Crown Princess Mary of Denmark and the recently acquired portrait of the Gallery’s Chief Patron, L. Gordon Darling AC CMG.

 

In his lecture Jiawei Shen will share his experience of a life devoted to creating portraits and show the stages involved in reaching a complete portrait likeness. His masterclass will concentrate on creating a portrait from a life model in oil paint.

Lecture - Thursday 19 July, 6 - 7pm

Masterclass - Friday 20 July, 9.30am - 12.30pm

 

Sydney based Wendy Sharpe’s artistic career has been one of firsts. In 1996 her Self-portrait as Diana of Erskineville was the first female self-portrait ever to win the Archibald Prize. In 1999, Sharpe was also the first Australian female war artist since World War II when she was commissioned by the Australian War Memorial in Canberra as official artist to East Timor. Bold and expressionistic in style, Sharpe’s work attracts attention. Her self-portraits – often sensuous and baroque – are tempered by the East Timor works which capture the tragic realities of the place and time as well as her empathy for the situation. Apart from the Archibald win, Sharpe’s list of accolades is long and distinguished; she won the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship in 1986 the same year she won the Sulman Prize for genre painting. Sharpe has been awarded two residencies at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 1987 and 2007, the Mercedes-Benz Scholarship in 1989 and the Portia Geach Memorial Prize for the first time in 1995 and again in 2003. Although Wendy does not paint portrait commissions, the diaristic nature of her work means that she has always made self-portraits. Sharpe is represented in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Australian War Memorial and various university and regional gallery collections. In her lecture Wendy will discuss her self-portrait practice in the context of the broader body of her work. Wendy’s masterclass participants will render the model through various drawing mediums including pastel. 

Week 3: Jenny Sages   
Lecture - Thursday 2 August, 6 - 7pm
Masterclass - Friday 3 August, 9.30am - 12.30pm

 

Born in Shanghai, China, to Russian Jewish parents, Jenny Sages arrived in Australia in 1948. Though she undertook studies at East Sydney Technical College, the Franklin School of Art in New York and worked with John Olsen in the 1950s, it wasn’t until the late 1980s that she became a fulltime artist – inspired by a visit to the Bungle Bungles in the eastern Kimberley in Western Australia. Artistic accolades soon followed with Sages winning the Portia Geach Memorial Award for the first time in 1992 with a portrait of art critic Nancy Borlase and her husband, unionist Laurie Short, now in the Portrait Gallery collection. Her 1993 portrait of Indigenous Australian artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1993) was one of the National Portrait Gallery’s earliest acquisitions. She won the Portia Geach again in 1994 and has been an Archibald Prize finalist fifteen times where her work has been highly commended by the trustees on five of those occasions. In 2005 Sages won the Wynne Prize for Australian landscape painting. The National Portrait Gallery collection also contains Sages’ portrait of author Helen Garner.

 

In her lecture Sages will discuss her annual ‘dance with portraiture’ through the Archibald Prize and also show the place of portraits in her artistic practice. Giving individual attention to all participants, Jenny Sages’ masterclass will take in the whole body of the sitter using various drawing media.

Single Lecture:
3 lecture package:
Single Masterclass (includes lunch):
3 Masterclass series (includes lunches):
Full Package (3 Lectures & 3 Masterclasses):

Masterclasses open to participants over 18 years, suitable for early career artists.
Bookings essential as masterclass numbers are strictly limited.
Enquiries, please phone: (02) 6270 8236.