What’s Happening At Tusk Gallery, June 2020

June 25th, 2020BlogNo Comments »

2020 has been a year full of surprises. We started the year off with a trip to Bali amid plans of exhibiting paintings at Art Fairs, Pop Up Exhibitions but the international turn of events has forced the Gallery “online”.

We have been selling paintings via our website. Just recently a client purchased a very special piece by John Martono that he did in 2011, a couple of years before he first exhibited at Tusk Gallery. John and his wife Citra visited Melbourne in 2014 when we brought him out to Australia for his first exhibition with us. Since then John has gone on tobigger and better things with some huge art projects in Indonesia and exhibitions elsewhere.

Another fun project we are working on is a trip back in time to the very beginnings of Tusk Gallery, way back in the late 1970s when we first started mounting reproductions of Japanese Woodblock prints and selling them at craft markets and homewares shops up the East Coast of Australia. Back then our business was called Kyoto Prints.

The new project is creating a series of beautiful reproductions of prints by Japanese wood block artists from the late 1700s and early to mid 1800’s like Utamaro, Hokusai, Hiroshige, Kiyonaga and many other artists. This period of art was called “Ukiyo-e”, translated as “Pictures From The Floating World”. This period had a profound influence on the European Impressionist painters. You can view some of the “Ukiyo-e” Range HERE on our Artscope Art Publishing website

The Gallery closed earlier this year so we could explore different aspects of our life. Georgie is an architect and she’s putting her skills into a project that we are doing in Bali where we are renovating a villa just outside of Ubud. I have had a love affair going with Bali since the early 80’s when I first visited Ubud and stayed literally five minutes away from where our villa currently stands. Georgie and I first visited Bali together in 1996 and since then we have returned many times. We have teamed up with a Balinese family and plan to create some lovely spaces for visitors to stay when they visit.

We’ve found several artists in Bali who we are interested in working with. Over the past few years we have exhibited work by a Spanish artist named Mersuka Dopoza who lives with her architect husband and lovely family in Canguu. We’ve also hooked up with an Australian artist who originally hailed from Perth named Christine Hingston. Christine (that’s her below in her Ubud studio) has built a beautiful house and studio with her photographer husband overlooking the Tjampuan Ridge close to Ubud.

During our last trip we came across an artist from java named Somad who now lives and works just north of Ubud. His name is Somad. A lucky client bought one of his paintings (below) a couple of weeks ago.