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Canberra Today 20°/24° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Art ‘summit’ honours late printmaker

 

Artist/printmaker Jörg Schmeisser
UNIVERSITY House yesterday became the scene of a summit of Australian visual arts practitioners as admirers, students and colleagues (including many former heads of workshop at the School of Art) gathered to pay tribute to the late artist/printmaker Jörg Schmeisser, who passed away in Canberra on June 1.

Among those attending who are rarely seen in public these days were senior artists Petr Herel, Jan Brown, Hiroe Swen and Ingo Kleinert.

During his lifetime he held hundreds of exhibitions, both in Australia and overseas.

His work is represented in the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Germany, Staatliche Sammlungen Dresden, Germany, Museum fur Ostasiatische Kunst in Cologne and the National Gallery of America.

In Australia, his work is held in all of the major state galleries as well as the National Gallery of Australia.

One of Australia’s finest printmakers, Schmeisser was, ever since Udo Sellbach in 1978 appointed him to set up and develop the Printmaking Studio, a long time resident in O’Connor, yet really, as his biologist friend Bob Taylor pointed out, he was an “artist traveller” who spent his life as an artistic globetrotting printmaker, quite often taking his etching plates with him.

He was, his children explained, fond of quoting from a poem, “ask, that your way be long”, also the title of one of his exhibitions.

Described by his former boss at the School of Art, Prof David Williams, as “the perfect gentleman”, Schmeisser was born in Pomerania, which is now Poland in 1942, but was raised as a German.

In a letter read by his wife, his brother Dierk Schmeisser in Hamburg conjured up the close family ties he had enjoyed in his childhood and his early love of art which took him to Japan, where he was to meet and marry his wife, Keiko Amenomori Schmeisser, also an artist.

A long and happy marriage ensued, as his little granddaughters Hannah and Emiko, showed.

His daughters Aya and Taë described the family’s many visits to Germany and Japan, to the art galleries of the world as well as  their father’s journeys, often with one of them in tow, to far-flung corners of the globe, where he experienced extremes of heat and cold to create his art.

A descendant of teachers, he could not resist lecturing his family on the artworks they saw and after his seminal visit to Antarctica, both family and friends alike endured many hours of slides and videos delivered in a manner that his daughters called being “Jorganised”.

Printmaker and former student of Schmeisser Diane Fogwell, who later became the co-founder of Studio One print workshop and lecturer in charge of the Edition + Artists Book Studio at the School of Art, described her early days of hands-on printmaking where she had told him, “I want to print your plates so that I can understand my own”.

It was a life of hard work, early-morning feasts of almond croissants and of exacting assessments that she, for one, had survived.

The artist’s love of classical music, referred to by several speakers, was honoured in a performance by cellist Julian Thompson playing Allemande, Courante and Sarabande from Bach’s “First Suite for Cello Solo”.

After a reading by artist John Pratt from Cicero’s “On Friendship”. Lutheran pastor, John Grosse, told of his recent meetings with Schmeisser during which they discussed spiritual matters in his native German.

Grosse’s offer to him of a Lutheran funeral was greeted with a smile the like of which the pastor had not seen before.

His moving account of the artist’s encounters with and growing understanding of the different religions of the world was one of the many poignant moments of the memorial, which was nonetheless, in the hands of Prof Williams and Schmeisser’s two daughters, full of light and joy.

Taylor summed up the artist’s great love of printmaking when he told the strange story of Schmeisser’s Desert encounters with the Bedouin family to whom he gave a print, the very same image later to be seen, framed, in a sophisticated European gallery.

As Taylor told it, that was the beauty of print—it could be in more than one place at the same time.

A reception followed at the Drill Hall Gallery, amid the “Antarctica” exhibition and power-point images of Schmeisser’s family, life and times was attended by even more former students of the late artist.

 

 

 

 

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Helen Musa

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