CAL2015.1 Yvonne Boag

Title
Pathway, Namsan Park

Location
In storage

Place of origin
New South Wales, Australia

Year
2015

Media
Painting

Medium
acrylic on canvas

Dimensions
130 x 162 cm

Credit
Winner Calleen Art Award 2015

Accession number
CAL2015.1

Excerpt from The Calleen Collection by Peter Haynes (2019)

Yvonne Boag was born in Scotland in 1954 and migrated with her family to Adelaide when she was 10 years old. She received a Diploma of Art from the South Australian School of Art (1976) before studying sculpture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (1984) and a Master of Fine Art at Monash University (2000). Boag has taught at various institutions in Australia and South Korea since 1976. In 2012 she was appointed Adjunct Associate Professor at the Sydney College of the Arts. She has won numerous awards and commissions including the Canberra Art Prize (2004), the Hutchens Prize (runner up), Hobart (2004), the Whyalla Santos Art Prize (2000), the Martin Hanson Memorial Art Award (1996), 100 x 100 Print Folio, Print Council of Australia (1998), Australia Council Studio, Tokyo (1997), Asialink Artist in Residence, Korea (1995) and an Artist in Residence at the Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen, Scotland (1989). Boag has been exhibiting since 1980 in Australia and extensively in South Korea where she has spent 10 months of each year for almost 20 years. Her most recent Australian solo exhibition, Here and there was at the Nancy Sever Gallery in Canberra in 2016. Boag’s work is represented in a large number of public, institutional, corporate and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Geelong Art Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, Telecom, Australia, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland, Artbank, LaTrobe University, Monash University and Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery. The artist lives and works in South Korea and Australia.

Pathway, Namsan Park is a work that has emerged from the artist’s long term fascination with Korean culture. She has been absorbed in things Korean since 1993 when she won an Asialink Residency to South Korea and she has returned there annually for over 2 decades. She says that “I like finding myself in an unusual place or a different place that I don’t understand at all because I am forced to make new pathways to understand it”. Boag’s work is a response to her immediate environment, an environment that takes in the city, the landscape, the people, the sounds and the language of a country that although more than familiar to her still finds her seeing herself as a familiar stranger. There is an intuitive quality to her work manifest in the rhythmical surface and the relationships between the forms and colours that energise that surface. Boag says of this painting ‘When I was working in Paris I was using Western colour, realistic colours that look like nature. But when I went to Korea, suddenly the colour just exploded because of the colour of their clothes and even the colour of the paint you buy in shops is so different. It is not naturalistic. It is quite an unreal colour. Colour to me is quite emotive, which is more like the Korean approach where each colour is symbolic”.