James Drinkwater

The intimacy and theatre of family life and everyday events are at the core of James Drinkwater’s art practice. Inspiration might be found in the coastal life he shares with his partner and children in his hometown of Newcastle, or in something as obscure as the architecture of his son’s vintage Japanese cameras - Drinkwater is drawn to the beauty right in front of him, the magic under his nose.

Throughout his career which began aged five with classes at the Ron Hartree Art School, Newcastle, Drinkwater explored both abstraction and figuration before developing his distinctive aesthetic. He shifts between painting, sculpture, assemblage, collage and drawing in the studio but it is primarily painting where his ideas are most fully explored. His canvases are viscous, sensual, and physical with the oil applied in thick swathes of colour by palette knife, rags and his bare hands. His contemplations on themes and concepts drive both materiality and composition.

In 2019 a major survey exhibition The Sea Calls Me by Name was held at Newcastle Art Gallery. Also in 2019 Drinkwater collaborated on the ballet Storm Approaching Wangi – and Other Desires, working alongside choreographers Skip Willcox and Belle Beasley as well as composer Joseph Franklin. Commissioned by Multi Arts Pavilion, MIMA Lake Macquarie, the project saw Drinkwater designing the sets and costumes as well as performing.

In 2022 James Drinkwater's work was included in the exhibition Singing In Unison – Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy curated by Phong H. Bui and Cal McKeever of The Brooklyn Rail. This landmark exhibition held in Brooklyn, New York, featured artists such as Sean Scully, Julian Schnabel, Ugo Rondinone, Ron Gorchov, and Dorothea Rockburne.

In 2023 two major survey exhibitions showcased James Drinkwater's work: Passage at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Darwin, and At Mid Career at the Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra, curated by Terance Maloon.

James Drinkwater graduated from the National Art School, Sydney (2001) before moving to Melbourne, then Italy and Germany to further his art practice. A finalist in major art prizes such as the Mosman Prize (2020), Paddington Art Prize (2020, 2017, 2016, 2014), Wynne Prize (2018, 2017, 2015, 2014), Kilgour Prize (2018), and the Sulman Prize (2016), he won the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship in 2014 and the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship in 2011. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia, and internationally in Germany and Singapore, and his work is held in private, corporate and public collections such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gold Coast City Art Collection, Newcastle Art Gallery, Monash University, Macquarie University, University of Newcastle and Artbank.

Carrie McCarthy

Born 1983, lives and works in Newcastle, Australia

EDUCATION

2003

  • Bachelor of Fine Art, National Art School, Sydney

1992

  • Ron Hartee Art School, Newcastle

COLLECTIONS

  • Art Gallery of New South Wales
  • University of Newcastle
  • Artbank
  • Gold Coast City Art Collection
  • Macquarie University
  • Monash University
  • Newcastle Art Gallery
  • Warner Music Australia
  • St Francis Xavier College, Newcastle
  • Bendigo Art Gallery
  • Maitland Regional Art Gallery
  • Macquarie Bank
  • Schnabel Collection, New York
  • Home Of The Arts, Gold Coast
  • Allens Law Firm
  • Private collections, New York, UK, Singapore, Australia, Germany

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2025

  • 'Kick Hard off the Ocean Floor', Edwina Corlette, Brisbane

2024

  • 'Somewhere Between The Sea and The Table', Vigo Gallery, United Kingdom
  • 'Fronte Oceano', Nanda\Hobbs, Aotearo Art Fair, New Zealand
  • 'Child at the Met and Other Journals', Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne Art Fair
  • 'AMERICANSALT – Montauk to the Bowery', Nanda\Hobbs, Sydney
  • 'ÉCOLE DES BEAUX ARTS: Just outside Toulouse', Nanda/Hobbs, Sydney

2023

  • 'You Could Just Make a Painting and Write It All In There - New Paintings from the Slip Room', Edwina Corlette, Brisbane
  • 'At Mid Career', Survey Exhibition, The Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra
  • 'Dobell's Storm, An Exhibition of Sets, Costumes and Media from the Ballet', MAC Museum, Lake Macquarie
  • 'Passage', Survey Exhibition, NCCA Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Darwin

2022

  • 'Tesoro Mio', Nanda/Hobbs, Sydney
  • 'The Boxer, round 2/ Old photos make me cry', Newcastle University Gallery
  • 'Sand Drawings and Other Tropes', Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne

2021

  • 'I love you so much I can't stop saying goodbye', Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne
  • 'The Boxer/When I Was Younger I Said My Prayers', Nanda/Hobbs, Sydney

2020

  • 'I love you more than paintings', Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne
  • 'A Day By the Sea, Informality', Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

2019

  • 'The Sea Calls Me by Name', 10 year survey, Newcastle Art Gallery
  • 'I love you to pieces then back together again', Nanda/Hobbs, Sydney
  • Sydney Contemporary, Nanda/Hobbs, Sydney

2018

  • 'Looking for Urchins and Louis Ferrari', Nanda/Hobbs, Sydney

2017

  • 'In the Halls of my Youth', The LockUp, Newcastle
  • 'Rungli Rungliot', Australian High Commission, Singapore

2016

  • 'An entire life, from the interior', NKN Gallery, Melbourne
  • ‘We are clumsy now on this Southern Beach, New works from the South of France’, Nanda/Hobbs, Sydney

2015

  • 'Every Pigeon in Paris Became a Dove, New work from Paris', Peta O'Brian Contemporary Art, London
  • 'In the Arms of Moreton Figs', Gallery 9, Sydney

2014

  • 'The boy cried STORM!!!', NKN Gallery, Melbourne
  • 'The boy and the ballet', Damien Minton Gallery, Sydney

2012

  • 'The Ocean Parade', Damien Minton Gallery, Sydney
  • 'Home Stretch', Cooks Hill Galleries, Newcastle

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2024

  • ‘How To Swim’, curated by Sally Anderson, EDWINA CORLETTE, Brisbane
  • 'Mastering Disorder', Cadet Capela, Paris
  • 'New Abstractions', Cromwell Place, London
  • 'Rue Des Fleurus, Athènes', Allouche Benias, Greece
  • 'A dream about a horse', Vigo Gallery, United Kingdom

2023

  • 'Untitled', Art Fair Miami, Vigo Gallery, United Kingdom
  • 'Salon Des Refuse', S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney

2022

  • 'Singing in Unison', Curated by Phong H. Bui and Cal McKeever, Brooklyn Rail, New York

2019

  • 'Postcards from Twin Peaks with Paul Ryan and James Drinkwater', Nanda/Hobbs, Sydney

2018

  • 'Kilgour Proze', Newcastle Art Gallery
  • 'Black Diamond Money', Byron School of Arts
  • 'Couplings', Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney
  • 'Sweetness of the New', The Yellow House Gallery

2017

  • 'Works on Paper', Beers Gallery, London
  • Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, Nanda/Hobbs, Sydney
  • Spring Art Fair 1883, NKN Gallery
  • 'Into Abstraction II', Macquarie University Gallery

2014

  • 'Paperweight', Newcastle Art Gallery

2013

  • Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, Damien Minton Gallery
  • Working Newcastle, University of Newcastle
  • 'Marked', Cessnock Regional Art Gallery

2012

  • 'Young Collectors', John Buckley Gallery Melbourne
  • 'Traces', Leipzig Art Fair, Germany
  • 'The Great Australian Landscape, Tim Olsen Gallery

2010

  • 'A Perfect Day to Chase Tornados (White)', Berlin

AWARDS AND PRIZES

2020

  • Finalist, The Vincent Prize, Marrickville, New South Wales
  • Finalist, Mosman Prize, New South Wales
  • Finalist, Paddington Art Prize, Sydney

2018

  • Finalist, Kilgour Art Prize, Newcastle
  • Finalist, John Glover Art Prize, Tasmania
  • Finalist, Wynne Art Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

2017

  • Finalist, John Glover Art Prize, Tasmania
  • Finalist, Wynne Art Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Finalist, Paddington Art Prize, Sydney

2016

  • Finalist, Paddington Art Prize, Sydney
  • Finalist, Sulman Art Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

2015

  • Finalist, Wynne Art Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

2014

  • Finalist, Paddington Art Prize, Sydney
  • Winner, Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Finalist, Wynne Art Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Finalist, King School Prize, Sydney
  • Finalist, Newcastle University Prize, Newcastle

2013

  • Semi-Finalist, Doug Moran Portrait Prize, Sydney
  • Highly Commended, Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

2012

  • Finalist, King School Prize, Sydney
  • Finalist, Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

2011

  • Finalist, Dobell Drawing Prize, National Art School, Sydney
  • Highly Commended, Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Winner, Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship
  • Finalist, Salon Des Refuses, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney

2002

  • Winner, John Olsen National Art School Life Drawing Prize, Sydney


July 23, 2024

JAMES DRINKWATER FEATURES IN ISSUE 2 OF ART-CLE FOR 2024

James Drinkwater has featured in ART-CLE Issue 02, 2024:

Known for his raucous yet meticulously composed paintings, James Drinkwater is one of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary artists. Yet, the words ‘contemporary’ and ‘artist’ are not necessarily ones Drinkwater would use to describe himself. He prefers the term ‘painter’, and he is a gestural one at that, drawing on influences from the vast legacy of Australian, British, American and French modern art he became obsessed with as a child growing up in Newcastle, New South Wales. Drinkwater says he started drawing and painting incessantly from the age of five, after becoming taken with the small landscape paintings his aunt would work on at her kitchen table.

Drinkwater’s talent was recognised and nurtured early on, not just by his parents and those around him but also by the art world itself. During our conversation, he fields a call from his dad, who wants to come around and see his recent paintings. “It’s never ideal, the time he wants to come,” Drinkwater says after hanging up. “But I’m never going to say no to that, it’s fuel. You talk about fathers not approving of their kids doing art… artists like Clarice Beckett, you know. My dad was there in the garage with me, standing with a ciggy and a chardonnay just going, ‘Oh, bloody brilliant James. Brilliant. Michelle, come look!’

Between the ages of eight and eighteen, he attended Ron Hartree’s now-closed art school in Newcastle and visited exhibitions whenever his parents could take him. He later attended the National Art School in Sydney—only for one year, before getting restless—and then moved to Melbourne, where he met his now-wife, the painter and performance artist Lottie Consalvo. The pair soon moved to Berlin, where they lived for three years before relocating back to Newcastle in search of cheaper studio space and a quieter life.

In 2014, aged thirty, he won the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, which took his family— then-newly expanded to three with the arrival of his first child, Vincenzo—to the Cité des Arts in Paris for three months and a further three travelling. Fast forward to June 2023, almost a decade on, and a survey exhibition at Canberra’s Drill Hall Gallery—James Drinkwater: at mid-career, curated by Terence Maloon—announced without hesitation Drinkwater’s arrival at that often tenuous artistic milestone.

Drinkwater’s paintings are defined by their expressive use of colour. They are rich in matter, working texture and colour into abstract yet familiar figures, landscapes and interiors that speak of his experiences both real and imagined. In subject, his work draws heavily on the intimacy of his family life, the oceanic environment in which he lives, the broader Australian landscape and the people and places with which he interacts in his movements and travels. As was the case for the 20th century painters Drinkwater has so admired, his own exploration of this personal iconography at once allows insight into his subjective experience and offers something of our shared world to dive into.

- Emma Pegrum, ART-CLE

IMAGE:

James Drinkwater, courtesy Nic Gossage

READ MORE HERE

July 10, 2024

JAMES DRINKWATER — 'I LOVE YOU MORE THAN PAINTINGS. WORKS 2008-2024'

James Drinkwater's new publication 'I Love You More Than Paintings. Works 2008-2024' has been released. Containing a comprehensive survey of James Drinkwater's artworks to date, as well as writings from Louise Martin-Chew, Ineke Dane, and Nicholas Thompson.

James Drinkwater paintings are physical, muscular, messy - articulating something that Picasso started - blending nameable and unnameable or recognisable imagery with nondescript painted signs, dancing in a frenetic ballet of attack after attack, sometimes confounding sometimes parting the seas of expression to a clear cohesive rhythm where painted cacophony reigns, not over matter but out of matter. Personal, familial, local of somewhere faraway and right around the corner.”

Julian Schnabel

IMAGE:

Cover of 'I Love You More Than Paintings. Works 2008-2024' by James Drinkwater


FURTHER DETAILS HERE

December 9, 2023

JAMES DRINKWATER IN THE SALON DES REFUSÉS 2023

James Drinkwater is included in the 2023 Salon des Refusés with his painting 'Your world is ever new' (2022).

On view at the S. H. Ervin Gallery, Millers Point, Sydney

IMAGE:
James Drinkwater
'Your world is ever new' 2022
oil on linen
138 x 168 cm

June 21, 2023

JAMES DRINKWATER: 'AT MID-CAREER' A SURVEY AT DRILL HALL GALLERY, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

James Drinkwater At Mid Career curated by Terence Maloon, Drill Hall Gallery, ANU Canberra

'Early recognised as an exceptional talent, James Drinkwater has never toned-down the intensity and bravura of his approach to painting. His work has mined a vast legacy of modern art – Australian, British, American, French – as if all of it remains relevant, fresh and available to him. Now, on the brink of turning 40, this is the first survey of his prodigious past. While his paintings evoke figures, landscapes and interiors, they are also meticulously composed abstractions, distinctive for their complex and opulent fusion of texture, colour and spatial intrigue.'

Exhibition current from 24 June - 20 August, 2023

IMAGE:

Installation view James Drinkwater 'At Mid Career' curated by Terence Maloon.

We are clumsy now on this southern beach 2016

mixed media on board

140 x 120 cm

READ MORE HERE

May 4, 2022

JAMES DRINKWATER FEATURED IN HOUSE AND GARDEN MAGAZINE

Lottie Consalvo and James Drinkwater have created a big-hearted, art-filled home in their terrace house by the sea. James’ art practice incorporates painting, sculpture, drawings and wearable textiles. "Since I was a child, making art was the clearest way I could express myself,” he says. His creativity is nourished by “generosity of any kind, whether it be the human spirit or nature itself".

- Elizabeth Wilson, House & Garden Magazine

IMAGE:

James Drinkwater, courtesy Alana Landsberry

READ MORE HERE

June 3, 2021

James Drinkwater FEATURED IN VAULT ART MAGAZINE - ISSUE 34

Written by Louise Martin-Chew