CYNTHIA BREUSCH
Cynthia Breusch was born and raised in Brisbane and is a graduate of the Queensland College of Art. She has held over 35 solo exhibitions around Australia and participated in numerous group and ‘by invitation’ exhibitions in Australia, in Tokyo, and California. Her first international solo exhibition was in California in 2004; a painting from this exhibition was featured on the cover of a major Californian magazine.
Cynthia has won awards for both figurative and landscape work. She has also been a finalist in many prestigious
portrait exhibitions including the 2024, 2022 and 2018 Salon des Refusés (the ‘alternative’ Archibald selection) and was a finalist in the 2022 Darling Portrait Prize (National Portrait Gallery). She was a finalist in the 2022 prestigious Darling Portrait Prize (National Portrait Gallery) and the 2022 and 2018 Salon des Refusés. She is an 8-time finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award (Australia’s most prestigious portrait award for female artists) and was a semi-finalist in the 2022 and 2017 Doug Moran Portrait Prize. Her work has been selected in other significant award exhibitions including the Mosman Art Prize, the Paddington Art Prize, Redlands Westpac Art Prize, and Tattersalls Landscape Prize.
Her paintings and drawings are represented in the public collections of the Tweed Regional Gallery, Ipswich CityCouncil, the Rockhampton Museum of Art, as well as the corporate collections of BHP Billiton, News Corp, the Tattersalls Club Brisbane, and the University of Queensland Press. Cynthia’s work is held in private collections throughout Australia, Fiji, NZ, Singapore, USA, UK, France, Germany and the United Emirates.
Her atmospheric paintings convey an other-worldly timelessness and evoke universal themes of meaning and purpose, memory, dreams and the transcendent. As she puts it, “I want to paint invisible things – the figure might be the motif but my real subject is the human condition and the mystery of existence…what lies beyond ordinary perception.”
Themes and titles of Cynthia’s work are influenced by her passion for classical music, ECM jazz artists, books andpoetry. She has travelled widely in Europe as well as in the UK, USA, Central America and the South Pacific. These journeys inspire her, as does the World Heritage area of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, where she lives and works.
CHRISTOPHER MCVINISH
Contemporary Realist painter Christopher McVinish is a master of light. It is essentially this element of his work which invites us to see the commonplace as special and suffused with potential. McVinish’s urban and outback landscapes, parklands and garden paintings tell intriguingly oblique narratives revealing contemporary life as a kind of half-remembered dream.
In recent years McVinish has garnered a significant profile for portraiture with sitters from industry, the legal and medical professions, and the Arts . His portrait of actor Robyn Nevin, OA, was selected for the 2011 prestigious Archibald Prize, and another of actor Colin Friels, took out the 2013 Salon des Refusés Holding Redlich People’s Choice Award. McVinish has been a finalist in many other awards including the Wynne Prize, Mosman Art Prize, Paddington Art Prize, Tattersalls Landscape Prize and the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award.
McVinish’s art is represented in Australian public and university collections including the Tweed Regional Gallery, Toowoomba City Council, Gold Coast Council, Redcliffe City Council, Griffith University, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of Queensland Press, the University of the Sunshine Coast, the County Court of Victoria and the Australasian Royal College of Surgeons. His work is also held in numerous private collections in Australia and internationally.
PETER WATTS
Peter Watts is an award-winning landscape artist. A finalist in the 2021 and 2022 Glover Prize, he captures fleeting moments of light and shade in the dramatic skies across Central Victoria and South Eastern Australia.
In 2022 Peter won the “People’s Choice” award in the Glover Prize in Tasmania and “Best in Show” at the Camberwell Art Prize Melbourne.
Born in 1963 in Horsham, Victoria, Peter’s paintings are influenced by vivid cloudscapes and landscapes around the Daylesford area, interpreting the wild combinations of shades, movement and time shifts inherent in the high hills. With a distinct perspective on nature’s ferocity and beauty, Peter moves from reality to a subtle abstraction that brings his work to life.
Peter is represented by Art Galleries across Australia and Singapore.
Peter has been part of the arts community for most of his life, with more than 30 years as an award-winning creative director of his design agency, Watts Design.
His design work has been exhibited world-wide including New York, London, the National Gallery of Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia. He has also been a judge for numerous prestigious design competitions worldwide.
