Episode 10: Raymond Arnold on revitalising a region through art
Season 1 Lutruwita | Tasmania
Episode 10: Part 2 - Raymond Arnold on revitalising a region through art
Raymond Arnold employs an en plein air approach to his painting. He rides his bike across the barren hills of Queenstown with his easel, canvas and paints to the scene he wants to tell the story about.
This is the second part of our two-part conversation with Raymond Arnold. The conversation naturally shaped itself into two main themes so we divided his podcast into two 35-minute parts.
Here in part two, Raymond talks about his printmaking and painting practice, and how he shares his art practice with his community in Queenstown with the aim of revitalising the region. In part one, Raymond gave us some background on why Tasmania is such an important landscape and how it became an environmental batttleground.
For the listeners who have never been to Queenstown, it is an extremely isolated town on Lutruwita west coast surrounded by forest sbd mountain ranges. It is now a landscape healing after bearing scars from an energetic copper extraction and smelter operation starting at the turn of the 20th Century which left the surrounding mountains bare, and the rivers polluted. In the late 1990s Raymond left teaching at the Tasmanian School of Art, and moved to Queenstown with his partner Helena Demczuk. Since then they have focused on their art practices and use art to revitalise the town.
In this episode we cover:
Raymond’s secret to his hyper-productivity is a daily routine of micro-sessions that allow him to cover a diverse range of tasks without burnout,
his philosophy of work, leisure, and social interaction coexisting. He prioritises minimal travel, community engagement, and drawing on the local for creativity,
Press West: a community-driven art space in the heart of Queenstown that he and his partner Helena Demczuk have established with the community in an old school in the centre of Queenstown. It focuses on workshops and exhibitions for local, national and international artists,
how his father’s industrious work ethic as a signwriter and community man has influenced his own approach to life,
Raymond’s different approaches and philosophies around the mediums of painting and printmaking, and
Raymond’s work printmaking in Paris and how this international studio experience strengthened his focus toward his local community in Queenstown.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in 1950, Raymond Arnold studied teaching and art in Victoria, Australia before developing his professional career in Tasmania. Over the last quarter of a century he has helped run an artist’s co-operative in Hobart, lectured at the Tasmanian School of Art, been Chief Examiner for HSC Art, printed thousands of screen print posters for community groups, worked as an artist in mining towns, schools and Universities, completed public art commissions, participated in Arts Tasmania and Australia council committees and received a Federation medal for services to the Art Community.
He lives out his days in Queenstown, Western Tasmania, where for ten years he directed, with his partner the painter Helena Demczuk, a regional art space titled Landscape Art Research Queenstown (LARQ) which fostered exhibitions, workshops, residencies and forums. For essentially this work Raymond was awarded with a Australia Day Tasmanian Local Hero award. LARQ morphed into WAS or Western Art Space which is about archiving the work of both Raymond & Helena. They are now engaged in helping to run a community art space titled PressWEST Tasmania which has a program of exhibitions, workshops and residencies.
As a compliment to this world, Raymond researched the intaglio print medium in Europe, working and exhibiting in France and the UK on a regular basis since 1993. This includes an ongoing collaborative project ‘Double Vision’ with Scottish artist Ian Westacott.
Raymond Arnold has held over 60 solo exhibitions of his paintings and prints in Australia, Europe and the US and participated in many group shows. He is represented in the collections of the Imperial War Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Musee Courbet in France. The National Gallery of Australia, the Australian Parliament House and various State Galleries have Raymond Arnold prints in their collection.
Raymond Arnold is represented by Australian Galleries and Bett Gallery, Hobart.
You can see Raymond’s work on our instagram page @artdestinations.podcast.
