{"id":19925,"date":"2025-02-20T14:27:48","date_gmt":"2025-02-20T03:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/?p=19925"},"modified":"2025-02-20T14:31:51","modified_gmt":"2025-02-20T03:31:51","slug":"perpetual-motion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/country-living\/artist-profiles\/perpetual-motion\/","title":{"rendered":"Perpetual Motion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Landscape artist Jo Bertini has spent the best part of four decades working in remote, arid parts of Australia abroad.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Jo Bertini barely pauses as she walks through the lightly timbered landscape of Turraburra station northeast of Aramac in central western Queensland. Sketchbook in one hand and paintbrush in the other, Jo is a veteran at recording what she sees as she moves through the bush. As an expedition artist, she has decades of experience painting and walking across country way more inhospitable than this former cattle station. The land has recently been purchased and is being regenerated by Suzanne Thompson, matriarch of the traditional owners, the Iningai people, and Jo and her partner, Thomas Studer, have joined a group of visitors to learn about the plans Suzanne has for sharing traditional knowledge of this ancient landscape and its rock walls and caves covered in her ancestors\u2019 paintings and engravings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s a privilege to see Jo in action as she incessantly records her experience of the landscape in watercolour and gouache, dipping her brush in the water-filled capsule that fits neatly over its tip, allowing her to perform the artistic equivalent of walking and chewing gum and fill sketchbooks with immediate reactions to what she is seeing. At the end of her trip, Jo will return to her studio and develop works in oil paints on a larger and more detailed scale. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jo\u2019s ability to record the moment while walking across inhospitable terrain has been honed over many years. \u201cI\u2019ve been doing it since I was a child,\u201d she explains. \u201cIn the desert, there are always water restrictions, so I developed the technique of using minimal amounts of my drinking water and refined it by using watercolours, gouache, crayon and pencil.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jo comes from a long line of artists and scientists \u2014 her mother was the sculptor Anne Ferguson and her aunt, the New York-based painter Judy Cotton. Her grandfather, Robert Cotton, and his cousin, Olive Cotton, are well known photographers, while other family members include flower painter Ellis Rowan and the ornithologist and bird painter John Cotton. Jo studied fine arts at The University of Sydney in the early 1980s, then headed overseas where she lived, worked and studied in France and Italy and by correspondence through The Open University in London for a decade. \u201cHaving a natural gift will only take you so far,\u201d she says. \u201cYou need good teachers to show you the short cuts and refi ne your technique. I was fortunate that I started doing medical drawings for money. I\u2019d sit in on surgical procedures, mainly maxillofacial and oral operations and draw the bits cameras couldn\u2019t photograph. That gave me money to travel and find good teachers, but also the ability to draw and paint anything. I\u2019d change hats between being a scientific painter and a creative artist. I didn\u2019t understand how much of a skill that was, but I now appreciate it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Perpetual<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Returning to Australia, Jo studied printmaking, life drawing and painting at Sydney\u2019s National Art School. She also put her scientific training to use with a decade working as an expedition artist for Australian Desert Expeditions, a group of experts from national universities, museums and scientific institutions undertaking ecological, archaeological and Indigenous research into the most remote and inaccessible regions of the Australian deserts. \u201cThe Simpson, Strzelecki, Tirari, you name it, I\u2019ve walked them all,\u201d she says. \u201cWe walked with camels carrying our supplies. The scientists need someone to draw maps and record the fossils and plants \u2014 the parts you can see and what you can\u2019t see under the ground. When an expedition needs an artist who knows how to light a fi re, boil a billy and not wash for three months, I\u2019m your woman.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jo has been a finalist in numerous art awards, including the Wynne and Sulman Prizes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Portia Geach Memorial Award, the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the Blake Prize, the Fleurieu Biennale Landscape Prize, Salon des Refus\u00e9s and the Mosman Art Prize. She\u2019s received public commissions, grants and artist-in-residencies from the National Museum of Australia, Brisbane City Council, the Bundanon Trust, Bathurst Regional Gallery, Hill End, Taronga Zoo, Murray Art Museum Albury, ArtStream Albury, Albury Regional Gallery and, internationally, in India, New Mexico and Colorado, USA. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Her work is represented in public, corporate and private collections in Australia and internationally and, in 2014, her book, Fieldwork, an archive of a decade\u2019s paintings from her sketchbooks, was published by Zabriskie Books. Most recently, she exhibited a suite of works celebrating the beauty and biodiversity of wilderness environments called Elsewhere at Sydney\u2019s Arthouse Gallery. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jo holds an American extraordinary ability visa, which allows her to live and work on projects in the deserts of northern New Mexico. She divides her time between Australia and the home she shares with her partner, musician and builder Thomas Studer, in the native American Tewa village of Abiquiu in Rio Arriba County. While Jo paints, Thomas works on his music and spends time on pro bono construction projects. They are also site stewards for the Chaco Culture National Historical Park<\/a>, which preserves one of the most important pre Columbian cultural and historical areas of the US, and spend a lot of time helping to preserve the extraordinary collection of artefacts and artworks recording the Indigenous history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI love the landscapes in New Mexico and I could spend another lifetime painting there,\u201d Jo says. \u201cThomas and I lead a very quiet life on acreage \u2014 we call it a ranch \u2014 surrounded by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It\u2019s high desert country with spectacular geology, the country is pink and rich red with layers of different-coloured ochres. When I come to the city, I suffer from sensory overload. I need isolation and silence to work and weeks and months of it. We spend a lot of time in the wild. It\u2019s much more benevolent than the Australian desert \u2014 the summers are not so hot and in winter there\u2019s snow on the cactus.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Pink<\/figure>\n\n\n\n


Jo and Thomas\u2019s home is in the least populated state in North America with the highest number of native American pueblos and reservations where the locals lead a very traditional lifestyle. It\u2019s just along the river from Ghost Ranch where American landscape artist Georgia O\u2019Keeffe found inspiration and ended up seeing out her amazing 70-year career in a small house in the Abiquiu village. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This extraordinary CV led to the National Portrait Gallery asking Jo to paint a portrait of author and \u201ccamel lady\u201d Robyn Davidson. \u201cAt first, I turned the commission down because they wanted me to do it in Canberra,\u201d Jo says. \u201cI said: \u2018She\u2019s a desert woman, I\u2019d only want to paint her in her environment\u2019. So, a year later, she was doing another expedition and I went along. At first, I could tell she didn\u2019t want a bar of it, as she kept avoiding me. She just wanted to be in the desert on her own with her camels. So, I decided to abandon the idea and just go off and paint landscapes. Then one afternoon, I climbed up on a sand dune and was sitting there sketching when Rob came up and sat with me. She watched me work and eventually said \u2018I wish I could do that\u2019. I said \u2018I wish I could write\u2019. And from there, we became friends and we\u2019re still friends.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jo\u2019s affinity for deserts started almost from birth as her family came from Broken Hill in far-western NSW. They moved to Oberon just west of the Blue Mountains in NSW and, as an adult, Jo owned a property in the Kanimbla Valley. In 2010, she purchased 50 acres (20 hectares) of \u201cgoat country\u201d at Peelwood bordering the Abercrombie River National Park in the NSW Central Tablelands. She moved in with just the wild pigs, kangaroos and wombats for company and is gradually regenerating the land and restoring the homestead. \u201cI bought i because it was what I could afford,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was very run down, but it had a huge old woolshed perfect for a studio and the remnants of a once grand orchard, so I could see its potential.\u201d Slowly, slowly and hands-on at anything she could manage, Jo has made the homestead<\/a> habitable. A timely commission from the National Museum of Australia paid for a new roof, but most of the hard yakka has been done by her own hands on a shoestring budget. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 2015 and \u201916, Jo travelled to Rajasthan and Kutch in India\u2019s north-west, sponsored by the Indian government and the Australian High Commission, to raise awareness of the plight of herders in the most remote parts of the country\u2019s north and show the value of their culture. \u201cThey are the most endangered people in the country,\u201d she explains. \u201cI had all the vaccinations possible, but I was still sick as a dog and it was challenging living the nomadic tribal life.\u201d The sojourn culminated in a solo exhibition at the Indira Gandhi Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, which is still touring the world and hopefully will come to Australia in the future. \u201cThe thing I\u2019ve learnt from almost 40 years working in the field is that desert people share a common devotion to their lands,\u201d Jo says. \u201cIt\u2019s what draws me to remote places and is why I will always return to the desert.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Landscape artist Jo Bertini has spent the best part of four decades working in remote, arid parts of Australia abroad. Jo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":19926,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[260,336],"tags":[447,70,71,448],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19925"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19925"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19940,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19925\/revisions\/19940"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}