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Born in 1944 in Leeton, Australia Currently lives in the United States |
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"As a child prodigy growing up in Australia, Yvonne Maree Thomas-John was driven by a singular desire to paint on paper the images in her mind’s eye. Unfortunately, the only art supplies available to her were crude wooden boards and tinted water. When these rudimentary materials proved too perishable, she prevailed upon her family for a more permanent medium with which to demonstrate her talents. Her youthful persistence came stunningly to fruition when her work was accepted by the Royal Museum of Sydney at the tender age of ten.
Strongly influenced by her mother, a superb watercolorist, Yvonne Maree displayed an innate representational tendency, working to replicate the environment and landscape indigenous to her homeland. After mastering her mother’s medium, she began working in pen and ink, and finally oils, translating to canvas a now-matured surrealistic vision of life. ‘Inspiration for my art is something that touches me in such a way that I need to either write about it or paint it.’ In 1973 an event occurred that touched Yvonne Maree profoundly. A calamitous automobile accident left her with amnesia, resulting in an almost total loss of memory of her previous life. As if a child again, she had to arduously relearn everything and trust her subconscious mind to respond to the familiar: a needed sound, fragrance, or image, to evoke a memory. In the creation of her images it is not uncommon for Yvonne Maree to have a somewhat voyeuristic experience. ‘Occasionally there is a feeling of a trancelike state when I paint, and I feel detached from it. Like being two people. One is just watching.’ Having recovered from her brush with death, she continues to blaze new trails of self-expression as an artist, designer, poet, and writer of short stories. Her painting does not go unnoticed. Her artistic accomplishments have been well documented and extensively reviewed and included in such prestigious collections as the Musee d’Art Moderne in Bordeaux, France. While dealing in subjects that range in diversity from conventional landscapes to illusionistic natural phenomena, Ms. Thomas-John’s current works attempt to conjoin the spirit of her Australian childhood with the ruggedness of her adopted home in America’s Northwest. Drawing from her own frustrations, intensity, and fervor, this complex artist articulates the subtleties and mysteries of life and death, light and dark, destruction and rebirth, with her diaphanous compositions and passion for storytelling."
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Selection of works from Yvonne Maree Thomas-John |
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