"Through the Valley is a journey through the Hunter -- through its history, its people, its geography and its beauty. The book gives insight into who we are, where we've come from and what we're passionate about." Philip Ashley-Brown, Radio 702 ABC.

Appealing to all age groups, are stories from the past and present, ranging from early colonial artists to the grounding of the Pasha Bulka.

Celebrated authors include Les Murray, Patrice Newell, Jean Kent, Julian Croft and Jan Dean.

Award-winning Herald journalist, Greg Ray, will launch Through the Valley at Newcastle Region Art Gallery. The function will commence at 5.30pm on Wednesday 7th November. Light refreshments will be served.

Please phone 4957 1466 or 4951 8859 to book by the deadline of Friday 19th October.

The book will sell for $30 but on the day of the launch there will be a special price of $25 for single copies. If you buy 5 or more copies they will be $20 each. Make payment by cash, cheque or money order, as they do not have credit card facilities.


With One Brush - Jan Dean

Eucalypt: A Tanka Journal (Issue 1, 2006)
Edited by Beverley George

Reviewed by Jan Dean

Kevin Connor, winner of the 2005 Dobell Prize for Drawing, speaks with Connell Nisbet about his art:
For artist, Kevin Connor, honestly “seeing” a subject and being able to recreate its essence on paper is the paramount enjoyment of drawing. It is the foundation on which most of his art rests and the most important lesson he can offer aspiring artists. But he doesn’t believe this is the main force driving entrants of art awards, nor the criteria for judging them. He won the first Dobell Drawing Prize in 1993 and judged the same award in 1996.
What are your preferences for drawing?
I work on the basis of drawing from life in sketchbooks. In my sketchbook I use a brush or a pen. I use the pen because it doesn’t actually give you anything much so you can concentrate on the drawing. You’re not trying to produce something that looks good. I also love drawing with Indian ink and gouache, then out of that comes painting. (That’s where an argument could begin - is that painting or is it drawing? But drawing is in everything. To my mind you could put a painting into a drawing prize and say “I’m putting in the drawing in that painting”).
What effect has drawing had on your approach to painting?
I could live without painting and making sculptures but I just could not live without drawing. Drawing is the very basis of everything. I could happily take my sketchbook and draw for the rest of my life and show nobody. I was drawing in the Wesley Food Hall near Westminster in London. A lot of ministers and priests eat there and poor people. And a priest came over to me and asked, “Are you a priest?” and I said, “No”. He said, “I just thought you were.” I think it was because I was so content. There is nothing really content about painting though.
Some of my best paintings have started with no drawings, but they are always based on knowledge of the subject by drawings. For a portrait I do lots and lots of drawings until I really know the subject and then I tend not to bother with the drawings again until that subject is before me – like, let them come out of the paint.
How does drawing differ from other mediums as a discipline?
The main thing about drawing is that it’s the joy of not having to resolve something. When you do a painting or a sculpture or an installation there is a need to resolve the work. So there is that basic difference. With a drawing prize like the Dobell, all the drawings tend to be resolved. They’re exhibiting pieces not just for the love of drawing. So unfortunately it almost destroys what it aims to encourage.
But would you encourage young artists to enter awards like the Dobell?
I don’t see anything wrong with exhibiting the work in a superb setting like the Art Gallery of NSW with a chance of winning some money and letting maybe 50,000 people look at it, whereas with a one-person show 1,000 people see your work if you’re lucky. I think that’s great. It’s better to win an art prize than to write out a long screed applying for a grant.
Is the Dobell Prize growing in prestige?
I think it is. It was a good idea to move it away from the others because it can be an event in its own right. It needs a bit of a push, publicity and all of that. A catalogue every five years would be a good thing. The other thing is that it’s got some very good works into the collection.
What made you submit Pyrmont and the City1992 into the first Dobell Prize over other drawings you might have had?
I think I thought it was an exhibition piece. If I was to be completely honest I might have put in a four inch by four inch little sketch that I liked better but there wouldn’t have been any point. I’m not too sure who said it first – I think it was Arthur Boyd – there was a feeling that it was a painting. He said, “If the artist says it’s a drawing, it’s a drawing!” and that’s true.
As the Dobell judge why did you choose Pam Hallandal’s Self Portrait in 1996?
I think it has a living presence. It is a good, finished looking drawing. I didn’t have any nightmares over it, which I have had for judging other prizes. Getting it down to the twenty-odd that is difficult. To be hung amongst a limited number is never good luck, but not to be hung is often bad luck. Judging art prizes is not an exact science.
Anything you would like to add?
I don’t want to be the old artist, advising … I’m the young artist … when you are up against a brick wall or in doubt, draw!

First published ‘Last Word’, Look, Art Gallery Society of New South Wales, August 2004, p. 54Reproduced with permission, Copyright of the Art Gallery Society, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Thanks to Jan Dean for directing me to this article.

As a resident of Cardiff, Lake Macquarie, Jan Dean has published widely in journals, anthologies and the literary pages of newspapers. She has won prizes in local and national competitions, and her poems have been selected for inclusion in the Best Australian Poetry (UQP) and The Best Australian Poems (Black Inc). With One Brush includes a selection of her previously published and awarded poems.

Jan gives some credit for her return to poetry in 1996 to six-months spent as an exchange teacher in Tanagura, Japan. She taught visual arts for thirty-five years after training as an Art/English teacher at the National Art School, East Sydney and Sydney Teachers’ College. Jan has served on the committees of regional writing groups, including six-years as the first female President of Poetry at the Pub (Newcastle) Inc. She is currently Vice President of the Hunter Region Fellowship of Australian Writers.


With One Brush was winner of the 2007 IP Picks Best First Book Award.

I could hardly believe when reading this manuscript that the author could sustain the luminous power of the poetry, and yet she did: each poem built on those before, with seemingly effortless grace, turning visual art, and especially that of the impressionists, into poetry.

In between evocative poems which explore artists, their work, and different mediums, such as “The Body and Brushes with Blood”, “Signed Auguste Rodin”, and “The White Curtain”, Dean’s poems are occasionally about fruit: the opening “Six Persimmons”, which on first reading immerses you in the sensuousness of the overripe fruit so you cannot see beyond it, but on further reading yields fruit you can actually pluck, it’s so real. “Skin a Fig” makes erotic connections between the fruit’s texture and human skin, more erotic still when the fruit are hidden away at the end. Dean also writes about the occult and archaic, from “Banquet” which take us to a hell or purgatory too intoxicating to be terrible, to “The Woman in White’, in which we encounter a female spectre whose connection to the preceding poem intrigues: could she explain why women were so inextricably absent from Dean’s hell? The connections Dean weaves between her poems, and in individual poems, hold rich secrets worth unravelling; the fact that she gives little away about their meaning makes them more appealing.

The collection’s great strength is the uniqueness of the changing perspectives Dean imagines for her poems: each time we leave the world of painting behind we are momentarily disappointed, but the new subject or device soon makes us forget. Particularly interesting were “The Dream Paster Muses”, which shows us the world from the vertiginous point of view of a man who plasters advertisements on huge billboards. Dean herself is a visual artist in a number of poems best described as word paintings: “The Door in the Wall” asks us to imagine what is hidden behind a mysterious door: we can see a love garden, a refuge, and also much more: all that the protagonist desires. “Acrobat” is a still life interior, but animated, and a panoramic view from the room where the artist stands, walls hung with art, trees bending outside, the children in their playhouse, until a great tsunami comes. Most vivid is the scene in “The Reading”, where we are brought right into the room as the poet witnesses a historic reading of Les Murray’s.

If Dean has a message through With One Brush, it is gently given: perhaps it is about the cycle of things, how, in “Script of Sorrows”, we might return to a world less mad, and more at peace. By the end, in “Creeping” and “Sensations”, we learn what we had suspected, that Dean’s view of things is hopeful, that the world can regenerate, and even that we can return and be given a second chance:

Waiting in amoebic form we’ll stay
floating along in boundless time, until
our shore leave comes…
and revitalised, we begin again

Amidst the conflicting visions of our times, a voice like Dean’s is needed, because she is able to see things with compassion and hope, even in the poem “Banded Rail”, in which a dead bird is brought to the poet. This prompts her to imagine the bird’s point of view in a truly ethical moment where we experience that spine-chilling sensation of seeing with another’s eyes, when she acknowledges: ‘for us to meet, you had to die.’ Existing in Dean’s world, even if only for the duration of a book, is experiencing a world in which many more things are alive than most of us had imagined, even a painting.


IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd.)


Aftermath by Jan Dean

Aftermath



One day blurs boundaries of fact
and fiction, causes poets
to favour numbers, discard words.
When numbers are paramount
will books ever balance? Seekers
of escape are rewarded with ironies
of further disturbance. While some
flounder for expression, desire solutions
consider fate, dwell on humanity
leaders make rhetoric. Words
become ominous, try to divide
into them and us, promote fears
of an unseen enemy. We fumble
through Nostradamus and Revelations
invest prayers into origami cranes.
Dust and debris from a site
of catastrophe, gather momentum
roll down our street, leave us ashen
become our nightmare
submerge us in shadow.



Aftermath was published in Reunion (2003): this collection was from members of the XX1 World Congress of Poets, which met in Sydney in 2001. They passed a Resolution: ‘Write poetry in the cause of Justice and to heal the world’s wounds.’