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OF the 32 finalists hoping to be declared winners of the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize this Friday, two have postcodes in Central Victoria.
But a more imaginative headcount of painters represented at the Bendigo Art Gallery exhibition would add a third local to the mix.
Partners in life and art, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green have worked so closely together since they teamed up in 1989 that their collaboration breaks mathematically boundaries.
“We think the combination is much more than one plus one equals two,” Ms Brown said.
“We have collaborated for so long there is almost a third artist, it won’t be just Charles and I.”
Ms Brown said the pair made a commitment to work together more than two decades ago – and have never been tempted to indulge solo projects or have flings with other artists.
“We recently did a series with Jon Cattapan, so you can’t exactly describe it as a monogamous relationship… but I don’t see the point of working alone,” she said.
“It may sound restrictive, but we both have a licence to make any decisions we like at any given time, we both have complete autonomy and we jointly own all decisions.
“For that, there has to be complete trust.”
Ms Brown said the relationship allowed them to brainstorm ideas and learn from one another, though conceded their layered and meticulous approach to painting was probably as exciting as drying paint to watch.
“It is slow art, it is about ideas that are complex and layered and dense… and it would be far too laborious for one person.”
The ideas explored in their Guy Prize entry reflect their decision to leave Richmond to reconnect with country and family in Castlemaine five years ago.
‘Song of Sorrow’ is part of an upcoming series which focuses on the landscapes and vistas they now explore from their “dream home and studio”.
“It is to do with the beauty of the landscape, but also the frustration that you feel that it could all disappear,” Ms Brown said.
Two images superimposed over an iron bark forest at dusk speak to that frustration – one directly and one in a more cryptic fashion.
“The globe is an antique model of the planets in the Musée d'histoire Naturelle in Paris... a very theatrical museum in darkness with lots of spotlit objects, hence all the light reflections on the globe,” Ms Brown said.
In the other corner is the 2012 edition of The New York Review of Books whose headline read: ‘Why the global warming skeptics are wrong’.
“In the city, the debate is about politics, it’s about people jockeying for position and strategy,” Ms Brown said.
“But when you come back to the landscape you see its beauty and its fragility – and that it is under threat.”
The Guy Prize finalists will be exhibited from August 29 to November 1, with the winner announced at the opening night. Ms Brown said it was an honour just to be among the finalists.
“It is a very important moment, being recognised in our community, because we feel very much a part of this region,” she said.
LYNDELL Brown is not the type of person you would expect to find in a war zone.
The Castlemaine-based artist is her element in her studio listening to Radio National podcasts and working with painstaking precision on collaborative paintings with her husband, Charles Green, a professor of contemporary art.
Yet Brown and Green toured Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007.
It was an experience left its mark on their painting ‘Song of Sorrow’ which will hang in the Bendigo Art Gallery from next week, an Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize finalist.
“I think our decision to move to the country, to be honest, was also a reaction to going into a war zone,” Ms Brown said.
“We were just so relieved to be back in such a safe place... it seemed almost like returning to a paradise.”
The husband and wife artistic duo did their tour of duty as official artists of the Australian War Memorial – though neither had imagined they would ever be involved with the military.
“We were approached and immediately refused,” Ms Brown said.
On reflection, the pair came to see it as an opportunity which would not only allow them the honour of following in the footsteps of artists such as George Lambert and Arthur Streeton, but Charles’ father, Douglas Green.
“Douglas was a painter and had been in WWII as a mapmaker for General [Douglas] MacArthur… he had travelled all throughout South East Asia with Gen. MacAarthur making maps for the pilots,” Ms Brown said.
“We realised that, in a weird way, it was sort of like we were almost completing a circle.
“It was such intense offer, we felt we had to accept.”
But even as non-combatants, the horrors of war took their toll on the then Melbourne-based artists.
Ms Brown described coming home as a reprieve.
“Because when you go into a war zone there’s a potential that something terrible could happen to you, and we escaped that unscathed, relatively,” she said.
“So we thought, well how do we prioritise what we want out of our lives now that we are back in Australia?”
As a result they moved to Castlemaine to be closer to Green’s family – and a quieter lifestyle.
But their work with the AWM was followed by a collaborative series on the aftermath of war with Jon Cattapan.
“So ‘Song of Sorrow’ is a deliberate turning away from conflict… this image is really about sanctuary rather than war – really the flip side of the coin,” Ms Brown said.
“It represents a decision to turn away, to an Australian landscape and to focus on the fragile beauty of the area we live in.”
The 2015 winner of the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize will be announced at the exhibition's opening, 6pm this Friday.
Held every two years, the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize is designed to attract some of Australia’s finest contemporary artists, awarding a generous acquisitive cash prize of $50,000.
This year, 31 works from 32 artists were shortlisted from a pool of more than 250 entries from around Australia.
The artists selected for the 2015 Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize are: Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, Fabrizio Biviano, Lynne Boyd, William Breen, Kevin Chin, Nadine Christensen, Marcel Cousins, Jesse Dayan, Ivan Durrant, Chris Dyson, Juan Ford, Shaun Gladwell, Helga Groves, Neil Haddon, Stephen Haley, Pei Pei He, Euan Heng, Col Jordan, Gladdy Kemarre, Adam Lee, Christian Lock, William Mackinnon, Viv Miller, Ian Parry, Josie Kunoth Petyarre, Matthew Quick, Bill Sampson, Jacqui Stockdale, Jenny Watson, Guan Wei.