Wendy Sharpe

Elizabeth Fortescue entered journalism in 1978, working at News Corp in Sydney. In 1979, she became a cadet, covering Sydney life, and initiated art stories, becoming visual arts writer for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph. She was arts editor of those newspapers from 2015 to 2021. Today, her art writing is published in journals including the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald, LOOK magazine (Art Gallery of New South Wales) and Openbook magazine (State Library of New South Wales). She is a long-term Australian correspondent for The Art Newspaper.

John McDonald is art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and film critic for the Australian Financial Review. A former Head of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), he is the author of The Art of Australia: Exploration to federation (2006). He writes for magazines and journals and has lectured on art and cinema, and curated exhibitions, including Federation: Australian art and society, 1901-2000 at the NGA.

Justin Paton is a writer and curator from Aotearoa, New Zealand, and has been Head Curator of International Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, since 2014. He is the curator of exhibitions such as Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter and Adrian Villar Rojas: The End of Imagination. Justin’s many publications include How to Look at a Painting (Awa Press, 2005), McCahon Country (Penguin Random House New Zealand and Auckland Art Gallery, 2019) and the book of the exhibition Dreamhome (Art Gallery of NSW, 2023).

Anne Ryan is Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, responsible for the collection of Australian prints, drawings and watercolours. She studied at the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales, and was the Sarah and William Holmes Scholar in the Departments of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum in 2001-02. Anne has organised exhibitions and publications on Australian art and artists. Her interests include modern and contemporary Australian painting, drawing and printmaking, with a particular interest in women artists. At the Art Gallery of NSW she has curated the Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial exhibitions Drawing Out (2014), Close to Home (2016) and Real Worlds (2020) and has curated the annual Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes eight times since 2015.

Scott Bevan is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. Scott is the author of six books, including Battle Lines: Australian artists at war (Random House Australia, 2004), Bill: The life of William Dobell (Simon and Schuster, 2014), and The Lake (No Shush Press, 2020). He has presented and directed documentaries, including The Hunter, Oll: The Life and Art of Margaret Olley and Arthur Phillip: Governor, Sailor, Spy for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and the online documentary Les Darcy: Maitland’s Fighting Spirit. In 2020, Scott co-curated and wrote the catalogue essay for the Newcastle Art Gallery exhibition Tom Gleghorn: Homeward Bound.

Stephanie Wood is an award-winning writer whose work appears in publications including Good Weekend magazine (the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald), the Guardian and Vogue magazine. She is the author of Fake: A Startling True Story of Love in a World of Liars, Cheats, Narcissists, Fantasists and Phonies. Stephanie has worked as an editor at newspapers including the Independent and the Daily Mail in London and the Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong. She is a former editor of the Age Good Food Guide and Epicure section. She writes a popular weekly newsletter underpinned by her belief in the power of creativity, curiosity and adventure.

Wendy Sharpe is acclaimed as one of Australia’s most significant and awarded artists. She has won the Archibald Prize, the Portia Geach Memorial Prize (twice) and the Sulman Prize (judged by Albert Tucker). She has received many major commissions which include Australian Official Artist to East Timor, the first woman to do so since World War II. Wendy is known for her strong figurative paintings, her use of narrative and a sensuous use of paint. She is the quintessential romantic painter, uncompromising, dedicated and unconcerned by fad or fashion. Her work addresses timeless issues such as love, passion, human relationships and what it is like to live in the world, subjects rarely expressed today in contemporary art. Wendy Sharpe’s work is based on drawing and imagination, made from intuition and experience. Her obvious understanding of drawing, composition and paint itself mean that she is often described as the painter’s painter.