Category Archives: Visual Art > Painting

Rachel Ruysch was a Dutch still-life painter who specialized in flowers, creating her own style and earning international fame in her lifetime. With a long and successful career that spanned more than 60 years, she became the most well-documented woman painter of the Dutch Golden Age.

Virginie Bovie was a Belgian painter and arts patron, well-known in her time but later largely forgotten. Current whereabouts are only known for seven of her more than 200 works.

Vivienne Joyce Binns OAM is an Australian artist known for her contribution to Australia’s Women’s Art Movement and her active advocacy within community arts. She has participated in countless exhibitions in her more than 50-year career, and her works are held in the collections of several major museums. She has worked across a variety of media, including painting, printmaking, performance, sculpture and drawing, and is respected among her Australian and global contemporaries, particularly within the feminist community.
Binns’ interest in community arts came from a desire to make the art world accessible to everyone, beyond the restrictions of art institutions. She believed creative expression was an inherent part of the human experience, and not allowing for this expression freely was a form of “social control”. In 1973 Binns worked as a field officer for the Australia Council for the Arts Community Arts Program, visiting regional areas to “investigate needs, resources and possibilities”.
In 1972 Binns collaborated with fellow artist on The Artsmobile, a travelling community arts project that brought Dada and Surrealist style performance work to centres along New South Wales’ north east coast. Described as “the offspring of a marriage between Fluxus and a local town council bookmobile”, the Artsmobile brought art-based activities to schools, seniors centres and public parks.
She later developed Mothers’ Memories, Others’ Memories in 1978 during her artist’s residency at the University of New South Wales. The project recalled the “lives of women and their means of expression in the domestic sphere”, by facilitating a space where participants could come and share stories of craft and needlework skills that they had been taught from their mothers and other members of their family. Described as “dense, fragmented, [and] multilayered” the final work was exhibited as a series of postcards installed on a postcard rack.
Binns began work on her next major community art project Full Flight in 1983, spending months in various towns of the Central West region of New South Wales, facilitating workshops, mural painting and skill sharing to celebrate “the creativity of ordinary people.”
Feminism was often present in Binns’ work, and she was a leader in the development of The Women’s Art Movement (WAM), which aimed to address discrimination and sexism within the art world through various actions and exhibitions. A major project was the documentation of women’s artwork through the development of the Women’s Art Register.
Binns’ first solo exhibition in 1967 in Sydney featured works such as Vag Dens and Phallic Monument and has been recognised as a key starting point for the development of feminist art in Australia. This exhibition was one of the first of its kind, predating Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party and “critically affirming the power of women’s sexuality whilst also provoking… a good measure of castration anxiety amongst the patriarchy”.
Binns was awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 1983 for Services to Art and Craft, and the Ros Bower Memorial Award for visionary contribution to Community Arts in 1985. Living in Canberra, she has been a Senior Lecturer in Painting at the Australian National University’s School of Art.

Alethea Mary Proctor was an Australian painter, print maker, designer and teacher who advocated for the ideas of ‘taste’ and ‘style’. Focusing on line, colour and form, she initially concentrated on drawing and painting in watercolours. Her decorative fans and drawings, typically watercolours on silk, were well received when they were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts and the New English Art Club.
Having moved to London in 1903, Proctor returned to Australia in 1912, to exhibit in Sydney and Melbourne. The National galleries of Victoria and New South Wales bought works, but she was disappointed with the overall response and returned to England late in 1914. She soon produced her first lithographs which, although she continued to paint, established her reputation when exhibited by the Senefelder Club. She later exhibited with the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers and at the Goupil Gallery.
Returning to Melbourne in 1921, she tried to promote lithography, but found little interest and returned to Sydney and joined the Society of Artists. In 1926 she co-founded the Contemporary Group to encourage young avant-garde artists. Although Proctor’s work was relatively conservative, it was considered ‘dangerously modern’ by Australian standards and brought her recognition but little financial reward. In 1932 Art in Australia devoted an issue to her work. She taught design privately and at the Sydney Art School, introducing many young artists to linocut printing, as well as teaching drawing for the Society of Arts and Crafts in the 1940s.
Regarded as an arbiter of taste and always elegantly dressed, Proctor wrote on fashion, flower arranging, colours for cars and interior decoration. She organized artists’ parties in the 1920s, designed the fashionably modern Lacquer Room restaurant in 1932 for Farmer & Co. Ltd and produced theatre décor in the 1940s. In her later years she continued to encourage young and innovative artists, took on portrait commissions and exhibited regularly with the Macquarie Galleries.