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John Edwards

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John Edwards Represented Artist Artsite Contemporary Australia.
John Edwards | Artsite  Contemporary, Sydney

Sydney Artist John Edwards, was a recent finalist in the 2023 Flow Contemporary Watercolour Prize, Wollongong Art Gallery, the Gosford Art Prize, Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize, the Moran Portrait Prize, and shortlists multiple times for the AGNSW Archibald Prize, the AGNSW Sir John Sulman Prize, the AGNSW Wynne Prize, the S.H. Ervin Galleries, Salon de Refusés, the Kilgour Art prize, and the Blake Prize, to name a few of his extended and recent achievements.

John Edwards has been exhibiting since 1984.

My current work, Captain Thunderbolt and the travails of Australian bushrangers, evolved from looking at Sidney Nolan´s ‘Kelly’ paintings with their brilliant colour and modernist depiction of home-made armour hammered out of ploughs. Ned Kelly´s masked dressing  up, has something of the spirit and grit of an Australian ethos of ‘making do’.

Narratives surrounding convict and bushranger images are integral to our Australian psyche with figures such as Ned Kelly, Captain Thunderbolt and Jack Doolan thriving in the imagination. Bush ballads are penned and images painted about such figures famed for stealing, philandering, ‘matey-ness’ and murder. Despite such waywardness, they attract enormous sympathy and public intrigue, in part because of skill and stealth in evading the law. Less is known about their feisty, gun-toting partners.

One such woman was the Indigenous Mary-Ann Bugg, also known as ‘Black Mary’. She was Thunderbolt's (A.K.A. the gentleman bushranger), second wife. ~ John Edwards, 2020.

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