April 12th, 2024Artists of the Central Highlands

with Eve Lamb

From his earlier days as a rock musician and his years at the prestigious Academy of Art in Dresden, Germany – to his new upcoming exhibition at the Convent Gallery, Daylesford’s Monty Osewald is the sort of vivacious talent whose creative work gets noticed wherever he goes. His personal story could be described as fiery, even phoenix-like. Ahead of his new show that opens later this month, he shared a little of that story.

Eve: Now I know you have an exhibition coming up at the Convent Gallery here in Daylesford,
later this month Monty. When is the launch?

Monty: It opens on Sunday April 28. I’ve been doing a burlesque series of prints of a stunning model, Mini Mayhem who is a burlesque performer. She is going to open the exhibition at 2pm with a burlesque act and that will be followed with me doing a painting of her in her outfit for the day. Of course the show’s up as well.

Eve: Yes. Please tell me a little more about the show. What does it feature?

Monty: It’s forty years of work. It’s called Forty Years of Painting, Drawing and Prints. There are about 50 works and it will run for a month. In one section there is the latest burlesque series done in 2023 and 2024, featuring Mini Mayhem. There’s a section for the Dresden paintings, the Samoan series, a Daylesford series and also a surreal series that I did following the death of my mother.

Eve: Monty can you tell me about your story as an artist? I believe it’s quite eventful.

Monty: I finished my rock n roll career in 1984. I wasn’t getting paid enough in that so I thought, oh I’ll do some painting. I did arts school years before that. I was at the Gordon in Geelong, VCA in Melbourne. But after I finished my qualifications I just went out and played rock n roll for years. I started doing artwork with a group show at the Works Gallery in Geelong and then a solo show at an artist-run space called Artery in Geelong.

I hadn’t painted for years and all of a sudden it just burst out. That went pretty well and I got a show at the Geelong Gallery and was bought up by a Sydney Group called the Sydney Art Bank. In Sydney I bumped into a really famous guy called Kym Bonython, an art dealer and entrepreneur who brought bands like The Beatles out to Australia. He said ‘show me what you’ve got’ . He said ‘bring all of it to my place in Kew’…

I pulled it all out and threw it down on the lawn outside his mansion in Kew. He said ‘I’ll take the lot’ – and we showed it in Adelaide and in Sydney and I ended up in group shows with people like John Coburn, Fred Cress, Charles Blackman. That gave me a lot of impetus to keep going.

I was in Geelong at that time. I ended up making fibreglass paintings and spent more than 12 months making this massive exhibition of paintings, each a couple of meters long and a meter-and-a-half high. They were all finished and ready, and I had booked the Qdos Gallery in Lorne and we had a show to do the next day.

All the paintings were in the factory down at Fyansford. That night I went to bed probably 3am. I lived at Lara. The next morning I woke up to go to school – because I was a school teacher as well – and I got a phone call in the morning. Somebody had set fire to the factory. All of the 17 huge paintings that I’d done were incinerated in this massive fire.

The guy that did it was an arsonist. He had problems. We saw him in the court. He got five years jail. He
had destroyed plenty of people’s businesses and caused millions of dollars worth of damage.

Eve: That’s terrible. Monty, how did you cope?

Monty: It wasn’t aimed at me but I lost out on a fabulous fibreglass show. Who knows what might have happened. I just sort of slumped. I didn’t know what to do next. I hung around for about a year and then decided ‘right I’m out of here’.

I went and lived in Dresden in East Germany for five years. I was actually born in Kiel in Germany so I can speak German. I’d sent a video clip of myself working at my studio in Lara to all of the major cities in Germany. I arrived in Dresden and went up to the front door of Akademie Fur Bildende Kunste, a massive academy. Beautiful.

I said ‘I’m looking for the video tape that I sent’. They said ‘we can’t find it’. I said ‘I’ve come a long way. I’ll wait until you find it’. And while I was sitting there, waiting, one of the professors came over and said ‘can I have a look in your art folder’.

He looked through it and said ‘come with me’ and he gave me a studio which I worked in for four years after that at the Academy in Dresden – for nothing.

Eve: That’s wonderful.

Monty: Out of the despair of the fire comes this.

Eve: And you’re still a practicing artist today. What is your genre of preference now?

Monty: I think that it’s expressionist.

Eve: And what is your preferred medium?

Monty: It’s oil paint. I use other materials but a lot of my collection are monoprints – oil
paintings on aluminium plates and those images are transferred to paper through an etching
press.

Eve: What is your subject matter of choice?

Monty: I’m really interested in people. But I also love doing landscape. Now I just love the fact that I am just painting for myself and just accepting the marks that come out. It’s a very spontaneous sort of mark-making ritual that I do. I’m living the life that I’ve always wanted to live.