User:Ausiarts/Add new information

User:Ausiarts/Add new information

June Evelyn Banks-Smith (born 10th September 1929) is an Australian painter, illustrator and published author. One of Australia’s important artists, painting landscape and buildings. She has exhibited in over twenty solo exhibitions during her career in Australian galleries, with her art practice interrupted with her family of 5 children, commencing again as a practicing artists in her early forties June Evelyn Banks-Smith was born in Malvern, in Melbourne. In 1945 she studied at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, at the age of 16. The Gallery School was traditional and academic, with a long and prestigious history. She began lessons under George Bell (who had his own art school in Melbourne that continued until 1950. Bell was a conservative modern artist but a very influential teacher. She was one of the two women (also Nan Patterson) studied alongside a young Fred Williams, Ian Armstrong and Clifton Pugh. It was suggested by fellow artists that J E Banks-Smith leave the National Gallery arts school when she was attacked a number of times on campus by a man who was stalking her, cornered and assaulted her a number of times, attempting to strangle her one evening. He was a soldier during the First-World-War. Campuses were not safe for young women, particularly at arts school with the prudish or sexually deviant and their misconceived ideas about rampant nudity and sex because life models were used. J E Banks-Smith continued to draw, and paint in oils and water colour during her marriage to Stewart Banks-Smith, and raising her family. She lived in Cobram for many years, resuming her professional practice as an artist in her early forties with twenty solo exhibitions in the years between 1970 and 2004 when she had a stroke. [edit] Work During her years as a full-time mother, Banks-Smith worked with portraiture, landscape and still-life in oils, water colour and illustrations in pen and ink, including her portfolios of buildings around Melbourne over the last century, some of which have been demolished. Banks-Smith prolific output began in her forties, including her twenty solo exhibitions, commissioned works and the illustration / authoring of her children’s books published in 2000 by Minerva Press, London, with several print runs. Banks-smith developed an impressionist finish to her botanicals and portraits painted in oil. She was commissioned by several prominent Melbourne families to paint portraits, as well as her family and other persons of interest sitting as subjects.