Edition - October 2024

A newsletter by Marina Lommerse

Bradbury’s call to action, and sage advice from art mentor Paula Silbert  —  that my next logical step is to pursue an international audience — spurred my trip to Venice. I enrolled in an incubator:  Contemporary Art: Framework to develop your ideas with the European Cultural Academy.

Before telling you more about my adventures in Venice...

🎄 Christmas is just around the corner. (Oh time flies!)

Are you thinking about what to get that special person?

My Art Collector Wall Plates are the perfect Christmas gift for an Art collector or design lover!

Three collections of iconic paintings, done on my travels allows you to tell your own story. Pick your favourite feathered friend or bloom to form a collage of your own choosing.

Don't miss out!

Deadline for orders 31st October 24.

(Orders ready for pick up or shipping 1st December)

Round plates $275 AUD / Oval plates $350 AUDSpecial price: 10% discount for 2 pieces and 15% discount for 3 or more.

Shipping/packaging $20 flat rate in Australia. Inquire about International shipping.

Contact me for orders:

marina@marinalommerse.com / 0437 726 459

Back to Venice and the Art Career Incubator....

What was my idea?

Since my career change into visual art I’ve developed a strong regional art practice. A decade of experimentation, learning, exhibition and public art commissions provide a solid launching ground for further development. Over 2023-24, I had state-wide success in a juried art exhibition and an invitation to be a host artist in a regional art show.

Now I wish to enter the international art scene. I mean to develop ideas for residencies and commissions that resonate with my focus areas: nature-based art that tells stories about place, memory, and community, and identify appropriate platforms to showcase and sell my work to an international audience.

My challenges

I want to do high quality conceptual projects. I’ve had success in exhibiting and receiving commissions for my art and creative projects with several state and private organisations. However, the funding for such projects in Western Australia due to a small population base and isolation does not cover resources required to expand my ideas, limiting what I can achieve creatively.

Art without borders is my vision!

Over the coming months I’ll tell you about the Venice incubator experience: Key things I learned. AHA moments. Who I met. What we did. Highlights. Outcomes. I’ll share the experience in newsletters disseminating process and outcomes, and a professional development workshop at the City of Melville in 2025.

60th Venice Art Biennale

Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, the 2024 International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia has several meanings.

'First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners— they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.' Curator Adriano Pedrosa.

More about Lorenzo Quinn's Building Bridges, click here.

My favourite Biennale Artist

A Venice palazzo housed the Grenada Pavilion exhibition ‘No man is an Island’. There Jason deCaires Taylor’s work called to me. Maybe because water is where I feel most at home. Perhaps because I love the otherworldly atmosphere of the undersea world. Definitely as my art relates to the themes in Jason’s work — humans’ evolving relationship with the natural world.

Most people just see the surface of the ocean and it is hard to think of something so plain and enormous as fragile. We don’t regard our oceans as sacred and we should.

- Jason deCaires Taylor

Inspirational novel:

Bloom: On Becoming An Artist Later in Life by Janice Mason Steve

BLOOM is a call to action for those individuals-not only in a later phase of life, but at any age-who feel the call to pursue a creative path in their lives.The pressures of the modern world force many into utilitarian careers early on. Artistic impulses lie unfulfilled, dormant. For some, at a certain point, there comes an ache in the bones, a deep longing for creative expression-a simultaneous sense of emptiness and overflowing feeling.