By Tanya Steele
Renowned Yarra Valley artist Jane Fitzherberbet will have her life’s work celebrated in an exhibition at The Memo in June.
A career spanning five decades will showcase the well known Yarra Valley artist’s work in “Journey: A Lifetime of Artistry”
The exhibition will include some older pieces from the beginning of her journey as an artist, unveiling work the public has not seen before.
Daughter Kate Fitzherbet said it’s a broader retrospective than they’ve done in the past because it includes many of her ceramics.
“She was a studio potter for about 20 years and It really traces her journey as a creator,” she said.
Jane passed away at 91, in 2021 in Healesville, her last solo exhibit to the public was in 2018.
Kate said her mother as an artist experimented with many different mediums, moving from ceramics to others like silk and then settling later onto acrylics and oils.
“She was always experimenting and trying new things and trying new ways of putting paint on canvas and board and charcoal and she used to make a lot of her own tools, so she could scrape and poke and wiggle and squiggle and do all the things she was trying to do to get the imagery in,” she said.
Jane used objects like credit cards to get clean lines, scrapes and flicks into her paintings.
Old sticks, pieces of foam and wire would be crafted onto paintbrushes to get different textures onto the canvas.
Kate said that her mother was always creative and as a child she and her sister we had some wonderful times making stuff with her.
“Her creative tendencies came out in the thing she did with us, we once made this extraordinary mural out of paper mache in our playroom,” she said.
Jane’s philosophy was to ‘leave it to the observer’s own imagination to find meaningful content in my paintings’.
Selections of her art are known for intense colours and evocative lines and imagery and this exhibition will showcase some of Jane’s responses to world events.
“Mum had a really good eye for colour, a really good understanding of it and she mixed colours beautifully,” Kate said.
“She expressed her anger and frustration through these, events such as the Bushfire aftermath and the invasion of Iraq.”
Jane mostly didn’t name her work but some of these pieces were named because of the significance of her responses to them.
Kate said that some of Jane’s other work was quite different because they were very much in flow pieces.
“She’d start and she said often she had no idea where she was going to finish up, but after a little while, that painting would take over and just lead her on,” she said.
She was much loved by her family who want to continue to share her work with the community.
“She lived such a wonderful and extraordinary life,” Kate said.
The exhibition opens at The Memo Healesville on 16 June.
