About Us

Joy Brentwood and Ian Pascoe share a house and art studio at beautiful Rhyll on Phillip Island in Victoria, Australia. Since we live by the water, we are surrounded by artistic inspiration - birds, boats, the bay and the surrounding landscape and vegetation

Rhyll is a small, sleepy, fishing village situated at the North-east corner of Phillip Island in Victoria's Westernport. Rhyll has a strong maritime history, following very early visitation and settlement by European colonists having first been visited by George Bass in 1798, http://pidhs.org.au

Joy and Ian are both members of:

The Australian Guild of Realist Artists

The Artists Society of Phillip island

The Pastel Society of Victoria Australia

and are represented by Quadrant Gallery Hawthorn and Meeniyan Art Gallery

Joy Brentwood recently won the Kath Ballard Watercolour Award in the Australian Art Excellence Award Exhibition at the Australian Guild of Realist Artists, November 2018.

At the Phillip Island and San Remo Rotary Art Show 2019, Joy was also awarded Best Watercolour.

Our recent exhibition, called 'Synergy', was held at Meeniyan Art Gallery from 3 - 29 April 2019. It featured 27 works, including four collaborative works.

In my art, colour and light is everything. 

I strive to create kaleidoscopes of colour and love developing subtle combinations of opalescent colours to create a unique artistic statement.

My artistic journey has taken me along a wonderful path and in many different directions. Originally watercolour flowers were a source of inspiration and still fascinate me, as there is so much to see in one beautiful bloom. In landscapes, it is light which is the fascination, light filtering through trees, falling on grass and leaves and flowers.

Recently I have been working with oil pastels on both sandpaper and canvas, and find the extraordinary vividness of oil pastels entrancing.

I also delight in the magic of watercolour (my first love) and love experimenting with the magical effects of watercolours on unusual supports such as Yupo and canvas.

Our move to Phillip Island has opened up a whole new world of seascapes and wildlife.

I taught watercolour painting for a number of years and was involved in organising several exhibitions for my students.My curatorial experience includes working for several years as weekend Gallery Manager at AGRA Galleries in Camberwell.

I have won many awards for my painting and in 2013 was awarded signatory membership of the Australian Guild of Realist Artists, in recognition of a consistently high standard of exhibited art, and allowing the use of the title AGRA after my name. 

ARTIST'S PROFILE

During a scientific career as a mycologist, I did many drawings portraying the technical details of microfungi in pen and ink. In my artistic career I initially moved away from  technical drawing, painting landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes in pastel and watercolour. Increasingly, however, the pen has lured me back into drawing the natural world.

Moving to Phillip Island has re-ignited my love of boats and drawn me into the wonderful world of waterbirds and honeyeaters and other plants and animals. The combination of pen and ink with watercolour provides a distinctive way of treating these subjects.

I am inspired to draw, as much as anything else, by the technical challenges of turning a complex array of visual inputs into a single well-expressed idea rendered mostly in black and white. I relish the permanency of ink, and the consequent absence of second chances - make a mark and learn to live with it!

Every painting is an experiment, a pitched battle between my abilities and inabilities to control composition, colour and tone and the technical aspects of the medium being used. If the result is unexpected, so much the better. Whatever the result, something is always learned, and who knows?..... One day I might get the hang of it!

Above all, my paintings have to tell a story through a combination of composition, atmosphere, texture and movement.

I am a member and former councillor of the Australian Guild of Realist Artists (AGRA).

Find me on Instagram @phungus15