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DEREK MILKWOOD
AKA VANESSA STOCKARD
BEDTIME STORIES WITH DEREK

Vanessa Stockard grew up in the small dairy town of Wingham on the mid north NSW coast. As a child she spent happy hours playing in nearby remnant rainforest, armoured by mystery, subtlety, and menacing beauty of the world she observed. Moths as big as her hand. Trees that towered overhead. The unblinking gaze of a watching bird. This subconscious imagery, rooted in childhood comes to life in the delicate still life, portrait and landscape paintings Vanessa makes.

 

At 12, Vanessa left Wingham to become a border at an exclusive girl’s school in Sydney. It was here she first encountered the idea of being something other that also inspires her work today.

‘Growing up I often felt like an outsider. At boarding school there was this perfect blonde brigade, and I was not that. Life is beautiful in many ways, and yet hard and sad for many people. Like The drifters and the outsiders. I often try to soften the pathos and sadness I see in the world by adding some comic relief to my paintings. Otherwise, I feel we’d all fall in a hole. Hopefully that way you get the beautiful with a joke on top.’

 

A graduate of the College of Fine Arts (COFA) and a three times Archibald finalist, Vanessa paints in her studio in Bowral, NSW. Her practise is a combination of brush strokes with the drawn line, a daily juxtaposition of control and letting go. Her love of the peculiar, the comic and the ethereal continues to drive her.

‘Oddity never worried me. My Sydney school was surrounded by three halfway houses, and often on the way to and from the boarding house, the girls were flashed by lodgers. To those people never felt threatening, just completely outside the norm. Derek Milkwood is someone like that. He's a gentle character I paint, based on a guy I use to see in a Sydney Park who would hang out naked in the reeds. I never knew his name, so I gave him one, Derek Milkwood. It just sounded like a wrong name for a misfit. I love him as a character and use his paintings to broach stuff I find unfair, funny, or absurd. If I have found life hard at times, what must life be like for him?’

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Vanessa Stockard was born in 1975 in Sydney and spent her formative years in a small country town in the Mid North Coast of New South Wales.  At 12 she returned to Sydney as a boarder at Abbotsleigh.  After graduating from the College of Fine Arts (COFA) Sydney in 1998 with a BFA, Stockard launched head first into the avant-garde art scene in the bohemian village of Glebe. 

 

Stockard is one of the most dangerous artists on the Australian, and by extension, international scene.  Her ethereal works of art are a window into the soul of a talented and complex artist, one whose legacy is bound to resonate well past her generation.  The existential nature of her painting viscerally questions our concepts of social relationships and reality. 

 

Twenty years of introspection and experimentation, ranging over a number of media, have forged Vanessa’s style and vulcanised her craft, enabling her to reveal complex misdemeanours, while simultaneously demanding the viewer’s self-reflection.  She deals with isolation and sadness with intimate care and attention. 

 

Vanessa is unhindered by failure, always continuing the discovery of things previously unseen, revealing work that is fresh, unlaboured and penetrating.  The deceptive everyday nature of her subject matter belies hidden depths of relationship, feeling and emotion.  One could describe her process as absence of thought, a freedom of construct, not unlike the stream of consciousness associated with authors such as Hemmingway and Thomas Wolfe. 

 

If light and shade were students, she would be their master.  This skill, combined with a naturally deft hand and a determined use of perspective, imbue her subjects with gravitas.  The artist refers to set design elements that often alter and morph as her piece progresses.  She has said she feels grounded from her ability to draw from the benign surrounds of familiar life, infusing these images with a meaning that yields a meditative satisfaction. 

 

Stockard’s oeuvre features many pieces developed without any direct visual reference but rather from memory, often incorporating domestic pets such as cats and dogs.  Juxtaposing the anthropomorphic nature these animals are given by our society, she infuses the personification of virtue and vice into the everyday canine and feline status quo of our pets.  Cats with their fluffy comical exteriors glint with an instinctive urge to kill and cruelly torment their prey, dogs with their providence of happiness, loyalty and friendship are flung back onto Churchill’s menacing metaphor for depression. 

 

The Kafkaesque mindset behind such works is reminiscent of the existentialist authors like Sartre and Camus.  Absurdism appears with cake imagery and its relation to a childlike nostalgia for happiness which may never be real, but rather imaginary, unattainable and unachievable.  It’s been said “pain is inexhaustible, it’s only people who get exhausted…” 

 

One can never “have it all”, to be both the artist and patron.  To intrinsically understand those things around us that others overlook is what we want from our artists, our creatives.  They give voice to the profound mystery of the world around us, surrounded as we are with consumerism, pointless greed, deceit and dissatisfaction.  There’s no pretension here in these paintings, just spontaneous insight and beauty.  Some art is said to speak volumes, but these works are more like innocent and delicate poems, whispering untold truths with an economy of words. 

Solo Exhibitions

 

2020 Young Curators, 3:33 Art Projects, Sydney

2018-19 Vanessa Stockard, 3:33 Art Projects, Clayton Utz, Sydney

2019 Enchanted, Van Rensburg Galleries, New York

2019 Vanessa Stockard, AKBelinger Gallery, Inverell

2019 Vanessa Stockard, Van Rensburg Galleries, Hong Kong

2018 Vanessa Stockard, Van Rensburg Galleries, New York

2017 Cold Comforts, curated by Amber Cresswell Bell, Sheffer Gallery

2017 Vanessa Stockard, Van Rensburg Galleries, New York

2016 Vanessa Stockard, AKBelinger Gallery, Inverell

2015 Halcyon, Wadsworth Gallery, Sydney

2015 La Vie en Rose, Art2Muse, Sydney

2014 Shift, Michael Reid, Murrurundi

2014 Textura, Art2Muse, Sydney

2013 Inside, Outside, Charles Hewitt, Sydney

2013 The Garden, Maunsell Wickes, Sydney

2012 Untethered, Maunsell Wickes, Sydney

2012 Tenebrism, Charles Hewitt Gallery, Sydney

2011 Vanessa Stockard, Artist’s Deli, Bowral

2010 Quiesce, Charles Hewitt Gallery, Sydney

2009 Siren’s Song, Charles Hewitt Gallery, Sydney

2009 Taree Regional Gallery, Taree

2007/8/9 Murdoch Collections, Portland, USA

2007 Cork, Portland, USA

1999 Dendy Cinema Sydney

 

Group Exhibitions

 

2019 Van Rensburg Galleries, AAF, Hong Kong

2019 Finalist – Moran Portrait Prize

2019 Finalist – Archibald NSW Art Gallery

2019 Derek and Friends, AKBellinger Gallery, Inverell

2018 Cat Show LA, LA

2018 Van Rensburg Galleries, Hong Kong

2018 Van Rensburg Galleries, New York

2018 Finalist – Archibald NSW Art Gallery

2017 Finalist - Portia Geach Portrait Prize

2017 Finalist – Archibald NSW Art Gallery

2016 Equus, Olsen Gallery, Sydney

2016 Birds Gallery, Melbourne

2016 Van Rensburg Galleries, Hong Kong

2016 Van Rensburg Galleries, New York

2015 The Moree Gallery, Moree

2015 Stones, Berrima

2015 Michael Reid, Murrurrundi

2015 Murdoch Collections, Portland, USA

2014 En Fleur, Queen Street Gallery, Woollahra

2014 Space Matters, ION, Kings Street Wharf, Sydney

2014 Autumn show, Bradman Art Gallery Centre, Bowral

2014 Murdoch Collections, Portland, Oregon.

2013 Goulburn Regional Gallery, Goulburn (award, highly commended)

2013 BCAG, Bradman Art gallery Centre, Bowral

2013 Sydney Children's Hospital, (permanent collection)

2013 Something Small, Charles Hewitt, Marrickville

2013 Is it a bird, Is it a plane, Charles Hewitt, Marrickville

2013 Wombat Hollow, Maunsell Wickes and Michael Yabsley, Kangaloon

2012 A Painterly Selection, Artist’s Deli, Bowral

2012 Views and Visions, Charles Hewitt Gallery, Sydney

2011 Think Big, Charles Hewitt Gallery, Sydney

2011 Mythos Fine Art, California, USA

2011 Murdoch Collections, Portland, USA

2010 About Flowers, Charles Hewitt Gallery, Sydney

2010 Something Personal, Charles Hewitt Gallery, Sydney

2009 Don Capon, Sydney Eye Hospital, Sydney

2009 Blank_Space Art Gallery, Sydney

2009 Perlcontemporaryart, Vaucluse, NSW 

2008 Taree Art Show, Taree, NSW

2007 Katayama, Portland, USA

2006/7 Guestroom Gallery, Portland, USA

2005 The Art Lounge, Sydney

2005 The Brush Gallery, Wingham, NSW

2005 Kelmans Winery, Hunter Valley, NSW

2003 Walcom Manning Art Prize

2003 Moulton Art Gallery Mona Vale, NSW

2002 Applause Gallery, South Melbourne

1998/9 Woollahra Art Show

1997-2004 Taree Art Exhibition

1997 Seal Rocks Show, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, NSW

 

Studies

 

2006-2007 Gilding and Carving with Dane Wilson, Master Framer, Katayama, USA

2003-2004 Julian Ashton Art School, (Anatomy and Life drawing)

2002-2003 North Sydney Art School, (Still Life and Landscape Painting)

1999-2001 The Framing School, Sydney, (Conservation and Object Framing)

1995-1999 University of NSW, COFA, BFA (painting)

1994 University of Sydney, Art History

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