Yolanda PILEPICH

I have an inherited a sense of the dramatic from my Italian/ Australian family. Life is to be lived – the good and the bad – with energy and passion; people, issues, art and politics. Depicting anyone or anything is a sensual thing with line and colour, shapes and contrasts which demands response.

My beginnings were humble, scratching around for materials – from childhood the stealing of pencils from our newsagent and the colouring books traced repeatedly and worn threadbare. I loved the study of art, from Carravagio, and Rembrandt with the shadows, light and dark, then the figures of Picasso and Lindsay; then to teaching and then to study interior design – more colour and more form.

Chunky models drawn quickly (the viewer is intrusive), portraits to be reckoned with, colours to invoke mood, demons glimpsed at – my figures don’t move freely and are resigned to it – but the colour and light around them do.