Dream Symbols
Yvonne Audette
Details
- Artist
- Yvonne Audette
- Title
- Dream Symbols
- Year
- 1986
- Medium
- oil on composition board
- Size
- 57 x 75 cm
- Details
signed lower right: Audette 86
inscribed verso: OIL / DREAM SYMBOLS
copyright the artist. Courtesy Charles Nodrum Gallery.
Provenance
private collection, Melbourne
by descent
Further Information
Audette undertook her early studies in Sydney at the Julian Ashton School with Henry Gibbons and then from 1951 with John Passmore who was to inspire her with his grater emphasis on colour and building a composition through geometric building blocks, influenced by Cezanne. She furthered her academic learning at the East Sydney Technical School with Lyndon Dadswell, as well as drawing sessions with Godfrey Miller, his abstract focus entwined with a personal mysticism. On the completion of her studies, Audette travelled and unlike the traditional European tour, she started in America, living in New York at a time when abstract expressionism was just coming to the fore through the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Mark Tobey, among others. In 1955, Audette travelled to Europe, settling in Italy where she remained for more than a decade, taking in the influence of European abstraction and developing her own unique language based on a wide variety of experiences, including encounters of contemporary art as well as diverse periods from both east and western art history through her extensive travels.
A dedicated student, Audette actively sought to surround and expose herself to contemporary art sources, experiences and teachers in order to absorb and redefine in her own unique oeuvre. This in turn undergoes her rigorous examination, with later work referring to and reenergised by earlier constructions. Her abstraction is complex, deliberate and carefully constructed, although there is an element of intuition with the formal construct often based on capturing the essence of a sensation, season or place.
Audette continues drawing to this day, stressing the importance of a solid academic grounding and imparting her experience in imbuing line with expression and an awareness of its place and balance within a composition.