Brush Strokes

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Uploaded By: Adam Rangihana . Category: Fun . Added on: 03 October 2017.
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PIP COURTNEY, PRESENTER: Australia's landscape has inspired artists for generations. But dedicated landscape artists have apparently fallen out of fashion in the fickle world of fine art. That hasn't stopped a dedicated group of painters who go bush a few times a year to work plein-air, or in the open air, following in the footsteps of some of the nation's famous artists. ARTIST: Being an open-air outdoor painter, the thing that grabs me, has always really grabbed me, is the light and that's really what gets me going in the landscape, it's the light. It's all about - any subject'll do me if there's a light falling on it that looks good. ARTIST II: If it's an early morning light on a river, for instance, if you can capture that by being there and have a viewer then come along and get that cold, misty feeling, you know, a bit of a shiver up their spine when that first ray of light comes through a cold fog, you know. If you can capture that and translate it so that other people can feel that, then you've done a good job. ARTIST III: My idea of it all is my feeling of beauty, to capture beauty. To me, beauty is light on a certain object and the landscape, different seasons of the landscape. That sort of thing is what I'm more about. SEAN MURPHY, REPORTER: They call themselves the Australian Plein-Air Group, landscape painters who gather a few times a year to camp out and paint outdoors. They're following in the footsteps of the Heidelberg School, legends of Australian art such as Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin, whose late 19th Century work was the birth of Australian Impressionism. It's not really a revival of the Heidelberg School; good landscape painting has never gone out of fashion. But for these artists, working plein-air is the key to really capturing the unique light, vegetation and colours of the Australian bush. KASEY SEALY, ARTIST: It's a similar thing to probably what they did. A lot of artists in history went out in the field to capture the light, get inspiration, ideas, that sort of thing. Yes, it's probably an extension of that.
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