Artist John Olsen celebrates 89th birthday at Newcastle Art Gallery

ABOUT a year ago, iconic Australian artist John Olsen agreed to create an iconic painting that would capture the essence of his birthplace. 

It was a deeply personal work, a reflection on his beginnings. 

Unfortunately, illness meant he couldn’t be there when the exhibition opened in November last year. 

But on Saturday at Newcastle Art Gallery – just a short distance from his childhood home – Olsen got to share a piece of that work, a slice of the Hunter, with hundreds of other art lovers.

Step inside the world of extraordinary bird photographer Leila Jeffreys

The Herald's photographer Peter Rae is thrilled to meet my lunch date, Leila Jeffreys.

"This is great," he gushes. "I've seen your work for ages and ages. I want to stand here and just go 'Wow', it's so gorgeous'."

The Metaphysical erotic art of Alphachannelling

Alphachanneling is a Swiss-born American artist based out of Oakland, California whose erotic artwork is a testament to the metaphysical plane of sexuality, exploring the more unseen facets of sex rather than the physical. He refers to his own artwork as a "devotional prayer to the feminine principal."

John Olsen retrospective: Brimming with life and love

If painting is dead, as some art critics say, nobody told John Olsen. "I'd like to know the time of death," he says with the brightest of glints in his eye. "I'm alive. So painting isn't dead."

At 88 years old and widely considered Australia's greatest living painter, Olsen is about to launch his largest ever retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria.

John Olsen: at home with the Australian artist

Over lunch at his home in the NSW southern highlands, John Olsen shares with Amanda Hooton a lifetime of insights into landscape, poetry and painting.

How gallery owner Tim Olsen found out who he really was

I had hoped that by asking Tim Olsen to have Lunch with the AFR, we might discuss the state of the contemporary art market, the amusing and less amusing side of life as an art dealer and growing up as the son of one of Australia's most successful painters.

Meet The Erotic Artist Bringing Psychedelic Sex To Instagram

A Bay Area artist who goes by the name of Alphachanneling has transformed his Instagram feed into a lush erotic jungle, teeming with vines, petals, bodies, leaves, flesh, and other all natural pleasures.

I've been following Alphachanneling for a while now. I love to get lost in the psychedelic wilds where bodies go to play and touch and engage in extreme, sometimes divine, pleasure. Until recently, I assumed the artist was a woman, probably due to the softness of the images, the way they buzz with goddess magic.

Celebrate Australia Day with Olsen's epic landscape

"I'm not old, I'm just aged," Olsen says, beaming, as the sun glints on the lake which laps his studio and sprawling house in the NSW Southern Highlands.

"One great value in being aged is that it allows retrospective thinking. I can now look back at the changes in my lifetime through a mental telescope....

Bird watching has never been more fun

Who's a pretty boy, then?

Leila Jeffreys’ remarkable portraits of rescue bird.

For Wonder, a rare albino turkey vulture, life can be trying. His terrible eyesight means that “he is afraid of his own shadow”, says Australian photographer Leila Jeffreys. He was found face down in the snow in Michigan and is now at a Californian rescue centre, where Jeffreys took his portrait. “There is a gentleness to him that makes me melt,” she says.

Sophie Cape - Into the Shadows

"A mother and daughter turn to paint and canvas to comprehend a family tragedy".

In light of World Mental Health Day, John McDonald reviews Ann  and Sophie Cape's current exhibition 'An Unending Shadow: Works Exploring Dementia' at Mosman Art Gallery.

Paul Davies

“My work is driven by friction between opposing forces of built and natural environments, design and art, abstraction and figuration.” We chat to Davies about his new exhibition ‘Other Desert Spaces’ and the direction his move to Los Angeles has steered his work.

Anh Do paints big lives for his first solo exhibition at Olsen Irwin Gallery

With a portrait in last year's Archibald Prize exhibition and as a finalist in several other art shows, Anh Do's artistic credentials would seem to be beyond doubt.
But Do's gallery dealer Rex Irwin has been a tough judge to please.
"He came before last year's Archibald and he looked at all the work and he went 'This is pretty much all not good enough'," Do says. "And I said 'What about that one? That's my dad and I'm going to put him in the Archibald' and he said 'No, not very good'."

Sophie Cape: Getting the art fix

Sophie Cape is a former professional athlete who retired from competitive sport ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics due to injury. She dabbled in art from a young age – inspired by her artist grandmother (Gwenna Thatcher) and mother (Ann Cape) – but it was when her sporting career came to an abrupt end that her art making became the perfect outlet for her restless, athletic energy and her love of being outdoors. Cape immerses herself physically and emotionally into the landscape. It’s here that she has discovered and developed her unique visual language, making large-scale, visceral artworks composed predominately outside, on the ground in seclusion.

Is There Great Art on Instagram?

For me, Instagram is a land of the midnight sun, a wide-open place that's always lit up, bristling with visions, pictures, strangers, shooting stars, screwballs, and well-known artists posting images from everywhere, together creating this immense abstract missive or amazing rebus that seems to speak just to me, the curious curator of my own lit-up Instagramland. Strangest in this strange land is that 123,000 people now follow me. Or are following their idea of me: New York Magazine's art critic acting out in pictures online.

Claudia Karvan steps in as Noah Taylor acts up

With his new film Edge of Tomorrow screened across Sydney this week, and his art exhibition opening yesterday in Woollahra, all that’s missing of Noah Taylor is the man himself.

Noah takes time out for a doodle

"I think everyone has their own doodling style," says Taylor, a prominent actor ever since his appearance in the 1987 hit film, The Year My Voice Broke.
He is referring to that automatic writing of symbols that people indulge in when they're "on the phone and talking about whatever to an accountant or something". He has found his personal symbols have tended towards the figurative.

Noah Taylor's art a place to connect with people in depth

NOAH Taylor may be a fixture in the Australian psyche for his acting performances over 27 years but his passion has always been closer to canvas than cameras.
Taylor, who scored his breakthrough role in The Year My Voice Broke in 1987, has revealed little of himself in interviews over the years but he told The Weekend Australian his art was a connection to people.

Bird Girl

Leila Jeffreys finds her wings giving flight to birdlife as art.

Pretty Boy

Meet Slim, a sulphur-crested cockatoo snapped by Leila Jeffreys as part of her native Australian cockatoo portrait series. Her photographs, printed at over one metre tall, capture the endearing personalities of these beloved birds, from shy and sweet to downright cheeky. 7–25 November, Tim Olsen Gallery, 63 Jersey Road, Woollahra NSW; timolsengallery.com.