Louise Beck

ArtistPainting

Jul 5

Written By Claudia Elliott

My art – by passion rather than design – records Sydney's ever-changing horizons and values in glass, steel, concrete and colour. These canvases entitled “SKYSCAPES” are like a series of surreal chronicles of our surroundings.
They make the viewer stop and look at the paintings and examine just what they are looking at ....they encourage the viewer to think about and evaluate these structures that surround them.
These works record the past(QVB); mirror the present (Sydney Tower); and project to the future (the myriad cranes at work on the city's horizon – like giant birds of prey picking over the bones of the past and becoming harbingers of the next millennium).
Because I paint glass structures I can use this medium to reflect, mirror and distort reality. The result is a sea of glass and stone shimmering, glowing and turning organic.
Louise Beck, a Julian Ashton Art School graduate.

Her work has been featured in a number of joint and solo exhibitions around Sydney including the Watch House Gallery Balmain, the Delmar Gallery Ashfield, The Art House Hotel Sydney and the Gallery HM at Redfern.
She has won many awards for both her landscapes and her portraiture while exhibiting at the Hunters Hill Exhibition as well as the Drummoyne and the Lane Cove Art Society Shows.
Louise was feature artist in the 2004 Manly Art Festival, having an extremely successful solo show in the Manly Pacific Hotel Gallery. Many of her works were purchased for local and overseas collections.
She has been a finalist in the Lester Art Prize (formerly The Black Swan) twice, and a finalist in the Percival Tucker Portrait Prize in Townsville.
For the past twenty years Louise has been working on a particular body of work which she refers to as her “SKYSCAPES”. These works, which debuted at Studio W Woolloomooloo in November 2005, represent quite a departure from her earlier work – focusing on Sydney glass skyscrapers, their reflections, their distortions and their refraction of light, colour and image. The result is a challenging, vibrant and somewhat surreal view of Sydney and its surroundings.
Martha Matthews, the curator of the St Vincents Hospital ArtSpace, where Louise had a recent solo exhibition described Louise's Skyscapes as “their surreal quality question both the physical quality of the reflective surface and the resulting broken image of the original object, like the unfolding of a “Transformer” like object.”