‘Town and Country’ an exhibition of new paintings and prints by Anita Laurence opens 2pm Saturday October 27th at The Muse Gallery. Read the Press Release.
‘Town and Country’ 2012 exhibition
PAINTINGS
LIMITED EDITION PRINTS
Anita Laurence Biography
Anita Laurence lives and works in King Valley, North East Victoria, Australia, with her husband master printmaker Bill Young. Together they operate professional printmaking studios that cater for their own ongoing collaborative projects and those of visiting artists.
Anita graduated in Fine Art-Painting, from the Prahran School of Art in 1983. During 1984 she became a member of a printmakers and painters studio in Middle Park, Melbourne with Jon Cattapan, Bill Young & Josephine Rowbury. She commenced printmaking with Bill Young at this studio.
Port Jackson Press first published Anita’s prints in 1985-1993 then with Chrysalis Publishing from 1993-2008. She has been a hand colourist for the prints of Michael Leunig, John Spooner and Geoff la Gerche at Chrysalis Publishing.
Anita has exhibited annually at The Muse Gallery of Milawa since 2003. These exhibitions saw Anita explore ways to combine the textured surfaces created through printmaking techniques with her love of colour and paint. Recently Anita has returned to painting on linen and canvas, her 2007 exhibition explored the emotional impact of the 2006/07 King Valley bushfires in her paintings of the landscape. First-hand experience, memory, oral stories and photos of the fires inspired these images.
From 1999 to 2008 Anita taught art as a casual relief teacher in the NE Victoria region’s primary and secondary and TAFE schools. She has also been a presenter at the GANNEA ‘Across the Arts Forum’ workshops in 2005 & 2003.
A member of the organising committee for the Annual King Valley Art Show since 2002 she has been strongly involved in her local community. In 2007 Anita was a co organiser of the ‘Where There’s Smoke…’ a bushfire photo exhibition. This project collected photos from the community and collated them into an exhibition with over 100 photos and stories. The exhibition won the Rural City of Wangaratta 2008 Australia Day Community Event Award. In 2005 Anita was artist in schools for ‘Regeneration’ an arts project for the Rural City of Wangaratta, which involved primary school students from four different schools creating 40 street sculptures related to themes of Seniors Week.
In early 2009 Anita was a visiting artist with Bill Young at the Cork Printmakers, Cork City, Ireland. Her ‘Corcaigh’ linocut inspired by her time in Cork was acquired in the Open section of the 2009 Silk Cut Award becoming part of the Silk Cut Foundation Collection which is gifted to the National Gallery of Australia.
From 2009 she has been Artist in Residence annually at The Art Vault in Mildura, where in her prints and paintings depicted the social history of Mildura were exhibited her solo shows ‘SunRaysed’ 2010 and ‘Along The Way’ 2012. Other solo exhibitions include ‘Horizons’ at Wangaratta Art Gallery 2009; Yalumba Wine Room Angaston, SA 2011; ‘Here & There’, Falkner Gallery Castlemaine 2011; ‘Town & Country’ The Muse Gallery of Milawa 2012
Her prints and paintings can be found in the National Australia Bank collection; Wangaratta Art Gallery Collection; Silk Cut Foundation Collection, National Gallery of Australia; Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Mildura Arts Centre and numerous private collections in Australia, Italy, Ireland, Japan, UK and the USA.