Hello! My name is Vanessa Rhodes (formerly Lewis) and I have spent the better part of my life asking one question: what did artists know, before we forgot?

 

I was born in Zimbabwe, Africa and then lived in England, South Africa, Greece and France before coming to Australia at age 16. When I was nine years old, my family travelled through Europe, on a kind of 'lets see everything' pilgrimage. Standing before a Renaissance painting in Florence, I fell in love with art and the rest as they say.. is history. What followed was decades of academic research, many hours of studio practice and an ever-growing collection of glass jars.

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Today, based on Naarm country, in Melbourne, Australia, I work as an artist and researcher whose practice is rooted in the materials and methods of painters from centuries past. I hold a Doctorate in the Philosophy of Fine Arts, with a thesis titled The Nature of Paint - a practice-led investigation into traditional materials as a foundation for a sustainable contemporary art practice. Every painting I make is a continuation of that research.

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My studio looks more like an apothecary than a modern painter's workspace. There are jars of ochre, natural pigments and historic art materials collected from all over the world, as far apart as Cyprus and the Kimberley. I work with semi-precious stones ground to powder, gold and copper leaf, walnut ink, pomegranate, stag horn and eggs to name a few. The recipes I follow were used before synthetic pigments existed, before the mid-18th century, when art materials were precious, hand-sourced, and irreplaceable.

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I begin with the earth, not the canvas. The materials come first, their colour, their origin, their character, and then the artwork grows from there. This means every painting carries something no print or reproduction ever could: the specific geology of a place, held in pigment, fixed to paper with ancient recipes proven to last centuries.

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Each work leaves the studio with a Provenance Record. It is a handmade record of the pigments used in the artwork, so that you can see and touch the very same rock the pigments come from. It is my way of keeping the connection between the art and the earth it came from, visible and tangible to you.

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I trained extensively in Australia, but also in Florence, Italy. I have attended long workshops with masters based in the USA and UK. My works are held in private collections across Australia and internationally and have been shown in galleries and prizes nationally.

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With the world changing so fast, and so much of nature under threat, I feel a deep responsibility to work with the materials of nature carefully, to celebrate what we have, to use only what the earth offers freely, and to make things that are genuinely worth keeping.

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What a wonderful & precious world. Thank you for being here!

Dr. Vanessa Rhodes xx