In The art that made me, artists discuss works in the Art Gallery of NSW collection that either inspire, influence or simply delight them. This selection by Wendy Sharpe first appeared in Look – the Gallery’s members magazine.
It was hard to choose just a few works from the Gallery that have influenced me. There have been so many. I grew up in Sydney and this is where I saw my first ‘real’ paintings. Paintings – and it is paintings I am most interested in – appeal for many different reasons: the idea, the subject, composition or paint application. I am not interested in most landscape painting, nor the cool and minimal, preferring the unashamedly subjective.
I travel often and I live and work part of every year at my apartment/studio in Paris, so I am lucky enough to see many great exhibitions. Even now with such wonderful technology, when it comes to painting, there is nothing like the real thing.
On my list could have been a Tosa School Japanese folding screen, which is a form I have worked with myself, but I decided to only list paintings on display, or else I would have chosen some 20th-century English paintings – Walter Sickert, Matthew Smith, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. I also would’ve chosen an Arthur Boyd from the Artist or Nebuchadnezzar series, or a work by my favourite living Australian artists, Kevin Connor and Peter Booth.