Betty Nolan
September 4 2015
25 years ago I came to live in Hobart and moved into a ramshackle house on the ocean side of the Tasman Bridge. I brought my family and career as an art teacher and painter. Teaching skills is hard on the abstract painter. Over time, I unlearnt how to use colour and gesture to express meaning. I began to use a brush, became interested in painting social commentary and used realism to help tell the story.
But lately I found myself become tired of drawing and washing brushes. Spreading paint with a wooden stick crept back into my practice and spray bottles full of ink proliferated around the studio.
This suite of paintings is a dialogue. Between then and now, abstraction and realism, the interior and the exterior life, structured over the course of a single day in Hobart.
