Louise Forthun (b. 1959), artist, works primarily in painting and printmaking and has an aesthetic and conceptual focus on architectural landscapes and urban environments. Born in Port Macquarie, New South Wales, she trained at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the Victorian College of Art, and she has exhibited regularly since the 1980s in Australia and overseas. Using a stencil-based painting and printmaking method, Forthun reconfigures and reinterprets images from architectural sources to create works that alternately define and blur the distinctions between painting, photography and printing, and which situate the cityscape in a tradition of landscape painting that has tended to preference images of the bush, wilderness and wide open spaces.
Angela Brennan's portrait of Forthun is an exploration of form and portraiture. The deep velvet palette is cleverly juxtaposed with the vibrant yellow and green of an abstract work by Stephen Bram in the background, and with Forthun's pale face and white pants. Brennan has captured her subject's large eyes and sculptural hair, while the flat, restrained composition provides a sense of meditative calm and offers an intimate and visually striking portrait of one artist by another.
Gift of the artist 2021. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program.
© Angela Brennan/Copyright Agency, 2022
Stephen Bram painting is kindly reproduced with permission of the artist
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