30 May 2024
This year’s Harbour Hospice Art Exhibition and Sale will feature live painting for the first time.
This involves an artist completing their work in front of an audience and Manly artist Amanda Moore has accepted the challenge.
Amanda is an award-winning artist who has featured a number of times in Hibiscus Matters. She specialises in portrait, figurative and landscape painting, using oil on canvas. She says this will be the second time she has live painted and the first time was “very nervewracking”.
“It does feel a bit like you’re back in the classroom and you can’t concentrate on what you’re doing because you know your teacher is standing behind you watching you work,” she says. She’ll be eliminating the possibility of “freezing” in front of exhibition-goers, though, by working on a piece she has already started. “This way there will be less ‘working out’ to do and I’ll be able to talk with people in between bursts of painting.”
The subject of the work is a woman she befriended on a singing course. “She gave me so many great singing tips I wanted to reciprocate by painting her.”
This year will be the 18th year the exhibition has run and to date it has raised more than $200,000 to fund hospice patient care on the Hibiscus Coast.
Organisers are expecting at least 75 artists to participate and a wide range of art will be up for sale, including paintings, lino prints, sculpture (indoor and outdoor), felt, ceramics, pencil drawings, acrylics and even decorated wooden nautical oars.
Two new artists will be involved – time lapse photographer Paul Belli, and Red Beach artist Nicola Warner who recently won the Unison Cup, the supreme award at the NZ National Purely Pastel Exhibition.
The Art Exhibition and Sale is on at the Estuary Arts Centre in Orewa over King’s Birthday Weekend, Friday 31 May – Monday 3 June 2024. The exhibition opens with a ticketed preview night on Thursday 30 May where attendees will get the first pick of the premium art on sale. Click here for details.
This article was first published in Hibiscus Matters.
