Ladies in Pink - Art Nu Exhibit

When it’s Winter in Tasmania, it’s time for Dark Mofo! Dark Mofo is a festival associated with MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art. It’s not your ordinary festival. Timed alongside Winter Solstice, the week or two of events range from curious, engaging and sometimes shocking. There was a guy buried under the road for three days one year. Things get weird. I love it.

The Nolan Gallery and School of Art usually runs an exhibition during this time to coincide with the festival and tons of tourists visiting. No tourists this year though! Melbourne went into lockdown right before it started, so the usual crowd was missing. But the show went on, and I was thrilled to participate in the Nolan Gallery’s exhibit this year.

This year, Nolan Art used the traditional nude figure in art as inspiration for the group show - named Art Nu. Betty writes, “The nude is often a misused genre, still redolent of painted girlie pictures for the upper class. This exhibition ignores this tradition and hands the depiction of the naked body back to the women and the very nice men.”

At first, I wasn’t sure if there was anything I could add to it in time. After all, I am writing and editing ANOTHER graphic novel. My brain basically has zero vacancies during this time. I have so many nude figure drawings spanning many many years and I try to attend life drawing whenever I have the capacity. So Betty suggested using them as inspiration for a pattern. Once she said the magic word, pattern, it sparked an idea.

Patterns are a happy place for me with art. I like to make them for fun, mostly just for myself and for personal use. If I could approach this show with that mindset, I would be able to make something quickly that would feel fulfilling and also not take up too much writing time.

So I worked with what I had - tons and tons of life drawings.

Some more recent ones in ink.

Here are a few on minty green backgrounds. I went through a phase of prepping paper with mint green paint before attending the session. I love the way black ink looks on this and little white highlights.

The next challenge was to clean them all up and arrange them in a pattern. I ended up separating these into two pieces because I realized I had so many pregnancy drawings that I loved and they looked really special together. In reality these drawings are all of the same two pregnant women, but all together in the pattern it looks even more powerful.

The nude figure in art has historically been depicted and dictated by men. In this piece, I aimed to celebrate the female form depicted from life in ink, viewed from a woman's perspective. I've created an interconnected pattern out of my drawings of live pregnant models. They were captured in a moment in time, in the essence of one of the most powerful parts of being a woman.

Here are some screenshots in the process.

Removing background colors, adjusting stuff… etc

Then it was time to figure out some color options! I removed the color from all of the drawings, and now it was time to add some back in!

Digital painting for one of the backgrounds.

After playing around with the colors and placements, I locked it in. To finalize it, I added more textures, contrast and extra black ink marks to unify it.

Ladies in Pink

Ladies in Pink - Pregnancy

Each one is a limited edition print run on stunning museum grade cotton rag which can be bought exclusively at Nolan Art in person or online.

Photo by Giles Hugo from the opening night.

Art Nu

Be sure to check it out if you’re in Hobart!