GALLERY TALK

Chris O'Doherty a.k.a. Reg Mombassa

Tuesday March 2
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

Chris O'Doherty a.k.a. Reg Mombassa is a very well know musician and artist who has been exhibiting
his artwork at Watters Gallery since 1975, the year before he and four other art school students formed
the band Mental As Anything. In 1991 he formed Dog Trumpet with his brother Peter O'Doherty.
O'Doherty/Mombassa produces paintings and drawings both in his Mambo style of work, as well as
tenderly observed atmospheric landscapes. He is the subject of the recently published book ‘The Mind
and Times of Reg Mombassa’, written by Murray Waldren.

GALLERY OPENING
Margot Hutcheson paintings
Special Art Month Exhibition
Wednesday March 3
Watters Gallery
6-8pm

New work by Margot Hutcheson, and our Special Art Month Sydney Exhibition, celebrating Art Month,
and the amalgamation of Legge Gallery with Watters Gallery. All welcome.

During our Special Art Month Exhibition we will display artwork in the newly enlarged, renovated gallery
by artists participating in our month of Art Month Artist Talks, as well as the diversity of other artists
Watters Gallery represents.

Visitors will be welcome to move through the entire gallery and display, print room and stock room areas.

SLIDE TALK
Margaret Tuckson ‘Tony Tuckson: Glimpses of his Life’
Thursday March 4
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

Margaret Tuckson will talk about her husband who died in 1973 aged 52, having only held two exhibitions
– both at Watters Gallery – but who is now considered one of the great figures of Australian art.
Tony Tuckson was Deputy Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 1957 to 1973. Margaret
Tuckson shared many experiences in Tuckson's professional and artistic life, including accompanying him
in 1958 to Melville Island to observe the carving and painting of the Aboriginal grave posts that are now a
feature of the Art Gallery of NSW collection.
GALLERY TALK
Catherine Hearse
Friday March 5
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

Catherine Hearse is well known especially for her extraordinary small sculptures, that explore what it is to
be a woman, a plant, a creature of the sea - or all three at once - involving exquisite crochet work.
The sculptures she creates are personages of astonishing delicacy of expression. These, and her
sensitive works on paper, are influenced to a large extent by textiles, of which she herself has a large
collection. Catherine Hearse will talk about the importance of Suzani fabric from Uzbekistan, old
European embroideries from the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and old chintz from India to her work.

STUDIO VISIT
Euan Macleod
Saturday March 6
Watters Gallery
Free bus leaving Watters Gallery 11.30, returning to Gallery at 2pm. It is essential to book a seat.

Free bus trip to this well-known artist’s studio. He will talk briefly about his work and show work in
progress. Euan Macleod will show work to be exhibited in White Journeys, Newcastle University Gallery
April - May 2010, thence at Watters Gallery (upstairs and downstairs) July 7 - 24. Later this year a
monograph by Gregory O'Brien will be released, followed by a survey show: Surface Tension, opening at
the S.H. Ervin Gallery November 12th, travelling to Tweed River, Newcastle Region Art Gallery,
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Orange Regional Gallery, and finishing at the University of
Queensland Art Museum at the end of 2011.

GALLERY TALK
Ken Searle
Tuesday March 9
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

Ken Searle has had 24 solo exhibitions since he began showing his paintings in the mid 70s. A
celebrated chronicler of the suburbs and communities of Sydney's south-west, Searle has also portrayed
the area around Papunya in the Western Desert, where he worked as a consultant for four years. His
most recent work is a commentary on the natural and made landscape of Botany Bay and the
watercourse of the Cooks River and its tributaries.

In his talk, 'Dirt', Ken Searle will discuss the ways in which the environment provides the style as well as
the subject matter of his paintings.
GALLERY TALK
Ian Howard
Wednesday March 10
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

Ian Howard is the Dean of the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. For forty years his
work has investigated the attributes of human society, for which war is often the ultimate expression.
He will talk about the history of his work: an enormous output that includes his rubbing of Enola Gay, the
Great Wall of China, his work in North Korea in 2008, concluding with his very recent rubbing of part of
the 700km Israel/Palestine barrier, 100kms of which is 8m high, 3m wide concrete walls. This
rubbing has been lent to the Palestinian Al Quds University in Israel to celebrate the opening of its new
art department.

GALLERY TALK
Rew Hanks
Thursday March 11
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

Rew Hanks is a Sydney-based printmaker whose narratives are amongst the most complex and
challenging in contemporary Australian printmaking. His post-modernist fables use irony and satire to re-
invent post-colonial Australian history.

He will present intricate linocuts from the last decade, sharing a range of ideas and concepts influencing
his work. These will include:
- the extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger and its future cloning
- John Glover and the plight of the Tasmanian Aborigines
- Kerry Packer's hunting escapades and near-death experiences
- Indian Mogul miniatures
- and his recent Aussie Icon series

A short DVD will be shown of Hanks working in his studio. An insight into his methods of cutting, printing
and hand-colouring will be seen.

In 2003 he won 6 awards, in 2005 he won 2, in 2006 two prizes again - including the Seoul International
Print Biennial Purchase Prize. In 2008 he won the 8th International Print Biennale in India, and in 2009
the Purchase Prize of the 2nd Bangkok Triennale International Prints and Drawings.

He has just been awarded the artist in residency in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney for 2010.
GALLERY TALK
Neil Evans
Friday March 12
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

Neil Evans dropped out of the National Art School in 1969 'with scurvy and malnutrition'. He soon made
his mark as a conceptual/performance artist. Since 1991 he has become better known as a painter; he
has been included in the Archibald (twice), the Wynne and Sulman exhibitions. His talk is titled:
'Referential Opacity'.

Referential Opacity has interested Neil for a long time, and he will use this conundrum of logic - that one
might believe something without being aware of beliefs behind it - as a springboard to informally discuss
the subjective natures of both creating and appreciating any artwork.

In a light-hearted and humorous way he will recall anecdotes from his 41 years of involvement with the art
world, and point out the references he has drawn upon to produce some of the paintings from his
upcoming 2010 solo exhibition - Friday Morning Paintings - in the hope of showing that referential opacity
can be both a help and a hindrance to a person either liking or disliking a work of art at first sight.

GALLERY TALK
Frank Watters
Saturday March 13
Watters Gallery
4pm

Frank Watters OAM, Director of Watters Gallery. After 45 years running a leading commercial gallery
Frank Watters has much to say about the importance of the role of commercial galleries both in enriching
the experience of art for art lovers, and cultivating the career of artists and their reputation through the
professional management of their estates.

GALLERY TALK
Joe Frost
Tuesday March 16
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

Since his first exhibition ten years ago, Frost's reputation has grown steadily. Sydney’s streets and
foreshores are at the heart of Joe Frost’s paintings and drawings. Frost has long been a painter of Goat
Island, Anzac Bridge and the western reaches of Sydney harbour, foreshore areas that are changing
rapidly, old industry giving way to residential and commercial redevelopment.

The likeness in his pictures arises from the play of pure shapes and colours. He is a natural drawer,
whose paintings reflect the immediacy of the drawn line.

Frost is an informed and interesting artist, writer and teacher. His thoughtful openness has endeared him
to students of all ages. Although he is still young - born in 1974 - Frost taught at the College of Fine Arts
for 9 years, the National Art School for 6 years, and he has taught Drawing Techniques at the Art Gallery
of New South Wales.

Joe Frost will talk about how his concept of painting has been shaped by other artists. He will show
slides of his own work, and work by artists who have influenced him.
GALLERY TALK
Jumaadi
Wednesday March 17
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

Many of Jumaadi's paintings take as their subject matter his experiences growing up into a young man in
rural East Java. Australia's landscape is increasingly exerting its influence on his work, however he also
returns regularly to Indonesia, to Sidoarjo, to paint.

Since May 2006 the name Sidoarjo has become synonymous with the mud disaster that began when a
gas well, managed by the company PT Lapindo, exploded. Since then thousands of tonnes of hot mud
have poured out over the land, displacing 70,000 people from their homes.

Jumaadi will talk about his experience being part of two cultures and painting two distinct landscapes.

GALLERY TALK
Steve Harrison
Thursday March 18
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

The scope of this internationally eminent potter's writings, teachings and consultations is wide-ranging.
His innovations in wood firing techniques are adapted here and overseas.

It is fair to say that no-one makes bowls the way Steve Harrison does. He will talk about his extraordinary
working methods: crushing with a machine of his own devising individually selected rocks, hand washing
them, and from the collected silt eventually making up the ‘clay’ bodies of his pots.

He grinds stones down to dust to make his glazes.

The ceramicist Toni Warburton has described Steve Harrison's work in terms of its 'radical localism'. He
has recently spent many long hours sorting little white granules of quartz from the dross of dark rubble
found on an ants’ nest so as to get just the right textured grit to add to his new ‘sack cloth and ashes’ clay
body.

He finds these painstaking methods exhilarating. He is a fascinating artist with deeply felt political beliefs
that he lives out in his work.

Harrison will also talk about his most recent trip overseas to Japan and Europe, where he had been
invited to build several kilns and hold kiln-building workshops.

In 1973 he was apprenticed to the famous Japanese potter Shiga Shigeo.

GALLERY TALK
Derek O'Connor
Friday March 19
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

Derek O'Connor has held 34 solo exhibitions in the last 17 years, including a retrospective at the
Canberra Museum and Gallery in 2007. The seductive power of his work and the trenchant thinking
behind it causes him to be sought after for definitive exhibitions.

O'Connor, who has a long-term exhibition of his work hanging at Chifley Square in the Allens Arthur
Robinson law firm, will talk about influences on his work, including Abstract Expressionism and the
photographs of Robert Frank, as well as reflections on his experiences as an artist from graduating from
art school in the mid 80s until the present day.

STUDIO AND SCULPTURE PARK VISIT

Paul Selwood
Saturday March 20
Watters Gallery is providing a FREE bus tour to the artist Paul Selwood's Wollombi studio and sculpture
park. Bookings essential. Lunch provided.
Bus leaving 9.30 am from Watters Gallery and returning to Watters Gallery at 5pm.

Paul Selwood's sculptures are, in his words, an attempt to capture 'a sense of place and time that's
ancestral and transcendental'. His achievement in this regard is made most poignant in his sculpture
park's riverside setting.

GALLERY TALK
Joe Frost: 'What use is an art school?'
Tuesday March 23
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

Joe Frost is a lucid and penetrating and often amusing art writer. In 2002 he started his own journal of art
criticism - 'A Public of Individuals'. He is a regular contributor to Artist Profile. He will discuss 'What use
is an art school?.'

Since his first exhibition ten years ago, Frost's reputation has grown steadily. Sydney’s streets and
foreshores are at the heart of Joe Frost’s paintings and drawings. Frost has long been a painter of Goat
Island, Anzac Bridge and the western reaches of Sydney harbour, foreshore areas that are changing
rapidly, old industry giving way to residential and commercial redevelopment.

The likeness in his pictures arises from the play of pure shapes and colours. He is a natural drawer,
whose paintings reflect the immediacy of the drawn line.

Frost is an informed and interesting artist, writer and teacher. His thoughtful openness has endeared him
to students of all ages. Although he is still young - born in 1974 - Frost taught at the College of Fine Arts
for 9 years, the National Art School for 6 years, and he has taught Drawing Techniques at the Art Gallery
of New South Wales.
GALLERY OPENING
Alan Jones ‘The Sharing Family’ solo exhibition
Rob Greer sculpture solo exhibition
Wednesday March 24
Watters Gallery
6-8pm

All welcome

GALLERY TALK
John Peart
Thursday March 25
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

John Peart has been producing abstract paintings of beauty and intelligence since before his first
exhibition at Watters Gallery in 1967 (43 years ago). He will discuss the ideas and intimations that
determine the way he approaches his work.

GALLERY TALK
Alan Jones
Friday March 26
Watters Gallery
6-7pm

Alan Jones has been exhibiting for 10 years and has achieved considerable exposure: 10 solo, and more
than 60 group exhibitions. In 2003 he won the Brett Whiteley Travelling Arts Scholarship. The painter
Ben Quilty wrote that Alan Jones's paintings 'live in a psychological space that most people are scared to
visit.'

Alan Jones's talk will take place in amongst his exhibition The Sharing Family (24th March - 10th April).
Jones will talk about how his ideas come together to form a body of work, illustrating his methods with a
description of his own working process - from notepads to exhibition.

He will also talk about working across various media - Jones produces paintings, drawings, large and
small-scale sculpture, and photography and he will talk about what such a broad practice means for
ideas.

Alan Jones's work explores ideas around the notion of identity. He takes a very personal approach to
subject matter, and self-portraits and family members often find themselves the centrepiece of new work.