CONGRATULATIONS TO LIZ SULLIVAN TWICE!!
Liz Sullivan
'Red Crunch' Acrylic and Oil on Linen
Liz Sullivan is securing her presence 'at the table' in major Australian painting prizes. Liz was a finalist in the Archibald Prize for portraiture earlier this year, and now Liz Sullivan has been selected for two additional, significant painting prizes. Clearly, she is doing something that is getting the selectors attention.
Finalist John Leslie Art Prize
Liz Sullivan
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
'Red Crunch' Acrylic and Oil on Linen
Courtesy of Cascade Art Gallery
Finalist The Kennedy Art Prize
Liz Sullivan
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
'Light Around the Corner' Acrylic and Oil on Linen
Courtesy of Cascade Art Gallery
GIPPSLAND Art Gallery $30,000 John Leslie Art Prize for landscape painting.
A total of 403 entries were received for the coveted national prize from all states of Australia. Artists had the option to enter up to two paintings each. A total of 52 paintings have been shortlisted this year. The list of finalists includes works by leading and emerging artists from around Australia and spans a wide range of styles and approaches from the field of contemporary landscape painting. (Courtesy Gippsland Times)
The Kennedy Prize is an annual Australian art award of $25,000 for ‘beauty’.
The prize, offered by the Kennedy Arts Foundation, is based and exhibited in Adelaide but open to Australian artists nationwide, and is awarded to works that embody, comment on or celebrate beauty.
In Sullivan’s own words,
“I have never stopped painting even during challenging times in my life. These days I have greater peace of mind and I can confidently take more risks in my work.”
Sullivan is a powerhouse of energy getting up at 5am to start painting in the studio by 6am. Coupled with this great joy and enthusiastic passion for painting, is a sense of urgent intensity that brings the paintings forward fast and furiously. This is clear by the sheer volume of paintings executed between 2022 and 2024.
Sullivan is thoughtful and intentional in her direct approach to painting but still allows, “paint to take over from imagery.”
As a young child Sullivan would stare closely at pictures in a book of her mother's about the Australian Heidelberg School. This interest informed her deep understanding and appreciation of the mechanics of paintwork, layering, gesture and glazing. The magic of mark-making even extends into her three-dimensional sculptural work which she sees as “an extension of the gesture.”
Moving from the Bayside suburbs of Melbourne and rediscovering her paternal roots in Victoria’s Central Goldfields has been a deeply satisfying inward and spiritual experience. She talks of a strong sense of personal direction at this point in her life and has a deep grounding in her daily practice. Sullivan researched and wrote about her father’s time on the Victorian Goldfields, and she talks of a literal earth-bound paternal connection with place. This feeling supports her in consolidating thinking and painting.
“I am questioning the categorising of ‘flower’ to paint the weeds on our roadside, the grasses lying with their individual kind of beauty.”
Instead of stopping to smell the roses, Sullivan stops to see the weeds.
Always looking for the unexpected beauty in the mundane. Her paintings, like Light around the Corner and Story and Red Crunch, are suggestive of deeper meditations at work. It is her truth in visual form. She is interested in water changing, the interplay of lines and shadow and lively passages of light and dark.
In her own words “I am not trying to be intellectual.”
Sullivan’s painting is an attempt to stay connected with an intuitive self, a self that quite simply loves to paint out ideas, observations, memories and express feelings.
Liz Sullivan
'Light Around the Corner' Acrylic and Oil on Linen