MEET AN ARTIST

Deidre But-Husaim

Deidre But-Husaim is a visual artist who has oil painting at the core of her practice. Based in South Australia, she has been a finalist in numerous major Australian art prizes including the Doug Moran Portrait Prize, the Portia Geach Memorial Award, the Sulman Prize and the Archibald Prize.

Known for her painterly and gestural style, Deidre’s exhibition ‘The Between’ documents life in the artist’s home and studio during various stages of lockdown.

Courtney Novak and Deidre But-Husaim in Conversation:

Your works that feature in the exhibition ‘The Between’ depict everyday objects that others might over look. Can you describe how this came about?

I think that during the lock-downs that we all experienced, it really gave everyone time to stop and to contemplate the things that were around us. It gave us the space to think. I didn’t intentionally set out to paint the ‘everyday’ it was more looking at the things I was surrounded by such as objects in my house, my studio and in my garden and thinking ‘I wonder how I would paint that.’ So, selecting which object to paint was more like taking on that challenge. One of these things was an Angel trumpet that was flowering in my garden during this time. I was fascinated with the process of it coming alive at night, and the fragrance and it’s beauty, but mostly, I was fascinated by how I would capture the stages of its bloom underneath the moon light. With so much time to spare, it also gave me time to go back through old photos and find forgotten images that I’d taken on overseas trips, and I was reacquainted with an image that I loved, the brushes in a Japanese pottery studio.

At the time when I took the photo, I never intended to paint this image, but looking at it again, I was just compelled to capture the light on these brushes, that’s what drew me in.

In this exhibition, you’re presenting work that includes 42 small paintings of bees –how did this theme unfold?

Like most of the subject matter in my works, the painting of bees was organic. I’ve often wondered about the movement of bees and how you would capture their movements through paint and express the detail of their tiny forms without them looking static.

I was taking part in a group exhibition where we had to paint a smallscale work, postcard size, and I thought this is the perfect moment to practice how to capture the bees in preparation for a much larger work Tinnitus that I was working on at the time. But instantly, people just really connected with these smaller intimate bee works. There’s something about the small and delicate scale that people love and I’ve since been selling them to collectors across Australia and the world.

What would you say is the overall intention of your painting? What would you like people to walk away with about after viewing your work?

A lot of people say that my work is lifelike, but this is never my intention. I always want my work to look like painting. And I guess I like that element, that people look at my work and then realise that it is a painting, and they are pulled in to look at it closer. The closer you look, the more you see in the work. For me, it is always about how the light hits the object and how I capture that light. And it is always about the paint. Always.

Deidre But-Husaim’s exhibition

‘The Between’ will feature at the Gallery 25 November 2023 — 25 February 2024.

Courtney Novak, Deputy Director