Image: Loique Allains’ winning artwork, 2013
Since 1981, the Lloyd Rees Memorial Youth Art Award has been celebrating the finest young artists working in the medium of painting, printmaking or drawing. It’s hard to say what Rees would make of recent developments in Australia’s artistic landscape, but the award bearing his name continues to uphold the values which inspired the man and his work.
A celebrated figure in Sydney’s bustling arts scene, Lloyd Rees lived and worked in the area and held positions on several boards, committees and councils. As founding president of the Lane Cove Art Society in 1965, the award-winning artist spent decades fostering new exhibitions of art in the area. As an OAM and respected artist, this influential member of the community used his position to promote the arts and aesthetics in various forms. His good work discovering and supporting emerging artists continues with the award bearing his name. Naturally, the award provides new artists with crucial early funding via the acquisitive $5000 first prize on offer (with the piece being acquired for the Lane Cove Council collection). The acquisitive award ensures the legacy of emerging artists by retaining and displaying prized works within the community.
There are further awards for Highly Commended and Commended entries, worth $1500 and $1000 respectively. The life of an emerging artist is fraught with expensive opportunities to study abroad and at home, and the money goes a long way in supporting young artists to develop their craft. But this is only half the main prize; the other being an all-important solo exhibition at Gallery Lane Cove. This part of the award represents the investment the gallery makes in emerging artists, and their understanding of the struggles they face early in their careers.
Award money is a boon to any fledgling painter or printmaker, but the greater challenge facing new artists is the difficulty of creating relationships with galleries. Sometimes it seems almost impossible for a bright young thing to get the attention of a notoriously haughty cultural elite; but Gallery Lane Cove has sought to rectify this imbalance. 2015 award also marks the first solo exhibition for a Lloyd Rees Memorial Youth Art award winner – Loique Allain, who secured the gong with her intricate monochrome lino cut landscape: Bull Creek Rd in 2013. While Allain is the first artist to receive this opportunity, she won’t be the last. Gallery Lane Cove plans to extend this crucial bridge to all their winners, and forge ongoing relationships with the next generation of visual artists.
This debut solo exhibition for Allain at Gallery Lane Cove follows two years of subsequent development within her field. Using the prize money she received, Allain travelled to France to complete a residency at the Atelier Countrepoint in Paris, extending her practice and building artistic networks in the process. Her exhibition will feature the large format monochrome prints she worked on there, as well as images from earlier in her career. As the boundaries of art contort and expand to encompass such areas as new digital media and immersive installations, the mainstay art forms of old can wind up a little flea-bitten and neglected. As much as the drive forward in innovative new forms has whet the public appetite for new art, it is equally exciting to see these new ideas and methods applied to traditional modes of artistic expression. While more and more artists attending university and fine art colleges, fewer young people are choosing to work in the relatively antiquated mediums of painting, printing and drawing – but those who are have been producing working of startling boldness; innovating and evolving traditional art forms. Through exploration of the medium, new artists were forcing judges and audiences to question just what it means to draw, paint or print.2009 winner Todd Fuller is one such artist. The Sydney artist impressed judges with the moodily animated charcoal and chalk figures of Watt Art? – With Permission. Since then he has gone from strength to strength, earning further awards and accolades for his evocative and (literally) moving work. Inspired by a combined early love of cartoons and dance, Fuller’s work proves that even the most traditional mediums are not static. Once he was unleashed abroad on his Paris residency he discovered beyond Australia’s borders the art world was surprisingly simple to navigate.
This award is one of many in the Australian artistic landscape, but one of few offering young artists the chance to create the kind of networks which will secure them real careers as artists. There are more prestigious prizes, with bigger money, but few are as singularly dedicated to the fostering of young talent, and welcoming new artists into their community. By acquiring the main prize winner, Gallery Lane Cove aims to make a permanent place for artists within the Sydney art scene which might otherwise be hard-won.
Rees’s fellow artist and founder of the Lane Cove Art Society, Guy Warren, joins Macquarie University Gallery Senior Curator, Rhonda Davis as this year’s judges. They are eager to encourage new artists between the ages of 18 – 30 to participate in the award. The closing date is near, so if you or someone you know is looking for a leg-up in the uber-competitive art world, get an entry to Gallery Lane Cove by August 1. It might be the break you’ve been looking for.Head here to find out more.
