Sydney Exhibition
Pearl Pietersen . Linda Phillips . Sue-Ann Stanford . Sung Pak
Opens Wednesday 22 November, 6 – 8pm
Runs 23 November – 3 December, 2023
Harbour is an exhibition of drawings from students that have undertaken our annual Drawing Courses run by artist and Scratch Founder Carmel Byrne. This exhibition is of students’ work from our Drawing II course Urban Landscapes & Open Studio, the follow-up courses to Drawing Beginners.
Spear-headed by student artist Pearl Pietersen the show comprises beautifully finessed charcoal drawings from site-specific studies, including harbour-side piers and neighbourhood buildings. Pearl is joined by her class colleagues Sue-Ann Stanford, Sung Pak and Linda Phillips.
Each artist explores scale and composition in their own way, drawing in the viewer with large scale renderings of up-close details or the more familiar small scale streetscapes. The resulting works are a celebration of how intimate and joyous mark-making can be.
Artist Statements
Pearl Pietersen
My cousins left South Africa for Australia by boat from Cape Town Harbour in the seventies. I’ll never forget the day we saw them off from the docklands that had seen centuries of human trafficking. They willingly sailed towards Sydney Harbour, wishing for the freedom they had never experienced in our country. However, Sydney Harbour was not always a haven or welcome place. It is this duality that I am interested in presenting in my work.
I first drew Harbour at Dawn in my sketchbook sitting on the pier at the Maritime Museum. It depicts a time when the city is quiet but stirring with a natural energy. There is the sound of sea birds flying between masts and ropes and the fog lifting gently, revealing the city’s urban development and the looming Crown Casino. I used ground willow charcoal with its warm sepia tones, compressed charcoal sticks giving textured darkness and the technique of rubbing back revealing shadows, movement, and depth. These techniques allowed for the expression of an enigmatic harbour scene. I referenced Turner for his depictions of a working harbour amidst the elements of nature.
Underbelly – Jones Bay Wharf was my introduction to large-scale drawing. It began in the Drawing II course offered at Scratch Gallery with open-air studies at the wharf and then completed in the studio under the mentorship of Carmel Byrne. In the studio, it transformed from a small plein air drawing into studies and then many hours of reworking and reimagining to reach the final large-scale work on paper.
I used charcoal’s expressive qualities to capture the wharf’s dark underbelly and the light creeping into the darkness. The dance of the light on the lapping water circling the pilings contrasts strength and persistence. The urban landscape is formidable, but nature constantly opposes its development.
Linda Phillips
Harbour Musing 1 and 2 pay homage to the essence of the many weathered elements clustered around the shoreline. The slim verticality aims to capture the vastness of space between the water, the shore and the city skyline. The final works represent many weekends of wrestling with composition, line, texture and shade. These are my first finished works.
Sue-Ann Stanford
As an emerging artist, Sue-Ann is enjoying playing with different media to realise her experience of “landscape”. In these charcoal works, she is exploring the idea of “Harbour” as an edge between landscape types, to challenge the idea of “safe harbour”. She wants to draw attention to the material persistence of a harbour, despite and because of, it’s role in managing water as it constantly, ceaselessly, changes.
Sung Pak
This work developed through Sung’s love of cities and buildings and how, like everything else, they evolve. Fascinated by these forms, structures and facades, Sung wanted to capture the individual character that they expressed. Thoroughly enjoying the process of exploring each subject matter within their locality, along with the development journey involved with each work.
