“I AM fascinated by the patterns that nature places before me. The shapes and the colours inspire me,” says painter Val Johnson.
Her latest exhibition, “Spirit of Lake Eyre” now showing in the foyer of Belconnen Arts Centre, perfectly illustrates this point.
Based on a flight over Lake Eyre in 2011, Johnson has intuitively expressed what interested her most, “the patterns and shapes, figures and faces formed by the landscape and the water”.
A student of commercial art at East Sydney Technical College while working as an artist at David Jones, she later studied at the Macquarie Art School Bathurst.
Johnson has been represented three times in the Portia Geach Portrait prize for women artists and in 1999 won the John Balmain Portrait Prize at the Bega Regional Gallery.
In 2001, Val she also won the inaugural Allan Hansen Award for Exhibiting Members at the Royal Art Society of NSW.
On a lighter note, she was hung in the Bald Archy Award in 2010 and 2011.
“Spirit of Lake Eyre” at Belconnen Arts Centre, 118 Emu Bank, Belconnen, 10am to 5pm Tuesday-Sunday until May 13. Artists talk May 6 at 2pm.
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