Surf Coast artist Amanda Holmes-Tzafrir’s new exhibition, Ethereal, is now showing at the Eagle’s Nest Gallery in Airey’s Inlet.
Holmes-Tzafrir said the works presented in Ethereal had taken five years to complete, but they were the culmination of an entire lifetime.
“My paintings take years to paint and glaze, and at least 12 months for the oil paint and the glazes to completely cure,” she said.
“So I work on a few paintings at once, going back to different ones at different times because pigments take different timeframes to dry.
“I think that painting now mirrors what we go through in life, and all that comes flooding back to the artist later.
“What I’m giving to people now is the most private thing I can share. It is a combination of a rich, diverse and passionate life.
“I could never have done this work in my 20s or 30s because I was still growing. It’s a combination of all my life’s work, all that growth, and it’s been poured on to the canvas.”
Holmes-Tzafrir’s paintings involve images of landscape in a way that UK Vogue described as giving “her work an extraordinary atmosphere” which “achieves a beauty and deep significance that distinguishes her modern Romanticism style”.
But she draws a sharp distinction between her work and landscape art.
“I’m not a plein air painter, I don’t go out and do representational art of Torquay, or the Twelve Apostles,” she said.
“I have the more fantastical, the work is highly conceptual. It’s not realism, it’s the creation of something beautiful to make a statement.
“My art always places emphasis on nature, imagination and our emotional response to a scene that may recall memories of a place in time, moments that are significant and meaningful.”
Holmes-Tzafrir’s work is held in private collections across the world, but she said it was strangely confronting to have her work exhibited in the place she calls home.
“I’ve focused all my life as an artist on international collectors; this is the first blockbuster show I’ve done in Australia,” she said.
“It’s quite nerve-wracking for me, because I’m painting for my own people.
“And I want them to be transported to another place, another world. If I can do that, then I have achieved what I wanted to achieve.”
Ethereal is showing at the Eagle’s Nest Gallery until January 29.
