Myrna McRae
Patterns and Perspectives
13 - 24 July 2022
G3
Opening Night
Friday 15th July | 6pm – 8pm
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Like many people Myrna McRae has enjoyed painting since her youth. Like fewer people, despite a long and highly engaged career as a teacher, it has been a continuous presence in her life. This new public exhibition, ‘Patterns and Perspectives’ with her friend Rosemary Clark, will be her tenth.
For many years Myrna worked with renowned artist, teacher and mentor, Helen Brack (known professionally as Helen Maudsley). ‘I repeated Helen’s beginners and intermediate classes over and over, always learning at least partly because she was so deeply serious about what she was teaching. She has great respect for an artwork, never allowing students to treat painting as trivial. She wanted each painting to have its own integrity. They can’t be hurried. That’s why, even now, each painting takes me a long time.’ Helen has opened all of Myrna’s previous featured exhibitions.
When Myrna retired, she started painting regularly with Sophie Skarbek, another of Helen’s students, forming a very supportive and productive relationship which has yielded five shared exhibitions. When she and husband David were first married, they built and lived in a house in the Grampians. This house was destroyed in the bushfires of 2014. Revisiting the site and subsequently spending time in these mountains near where she grew up in Horsham prompted Myrna to start using the Grampians as a subject.
Initially she used more conventional techniques of landscape painting to depict them. Subsequently she used motifs, shapes and colour to illustrate not just the physical places but her complex reactions to them as well. ‘I find abstracting my response much more interesting and imaginative,’ she says while maintaining the expression of her warm connection with both what’s there now and what she sees as underlying, resulting in works full of vitality, buoyancy and interest.
This new exhibition takes this process a step further to consider the interaction of the natural and built worlds. Influences as varied as Montenegrin artist Vojo Stanic and the iconic art of Central Asia as well as Maudsley’s most recent exhibition have found their way into her work making it more elemental, more precise, more telling.
Shows
1996 ‘Nude Tones’ (with Sophie Skarbeck), The Highway Gallery, Mt Waverley
2002 ‘Story Tellers’ (with Sophie Skarbek and Yvonne Patton), Polly Courtin Gallery, Swanston St, Melbourne
2005, 2006, 2008 ‘Teachers’ Work’ (exhibitions shared with other teachers primarily from Princes Hill Secondary College, North Carlton)
2009 ‘Another Take’ (with Sophie Skarbek), Red Gallery, North Fitzroy
2012 ‘Duet’ (with Sophie Skarbek), Red Gallery, North Fitzroy
2015 ‘Wonderland’ (with Sophie Skarbek), Red Gallery, North Fitzroy
2022 ‘Paintings’ (with Ned Johnson), Red Gallery, North Fitzroy
Contact
Phone : (03) 9482 3550
mail@redgallery.com.au
Address
157 St Georges Rd
Fitzroy North, Victoria, 3068
Map
How to get here
Tram: route 11
Stop 21 just north of Edinburgh Gardens
Melway ref: 30B12
Parking in nearby streets
Bus: 504 (Reid Street)
