After many years of paying her dues in the competitive world of professional video production, Bullarto’s Nadine Jade has reached the stage where she can finally choose which projects to accept.

It’s a position many in this hard-to-crack field would envy – but it’s been hard-earnt.

Nadine’s chosen path emerged early, while still at high school in Ballarat when she started studying photography and then video production.

“When I was in year 10 I discovered the dark room. It was the mid-90s so it was still film and analogue VHS editing,” she says.

“I found I loved capturing people. Then I discovered video and the Mount Clear High School at Ballarat was very well equipped with a TV studio and editing suite so I learnt how to properly produce videos from about the age of 16.

“Then I started to do pro shoots in crews and make music videos. When it went to digital I was in my early 20s and I taught myself digital editing… I love editing. Turning beautiful shots into a coherent story.

“When I was 22 I started working in the industry as a video editor in Prahran.”

Creating video is a passion as well as a profession for Nadine who has just produced a video telling the story of artist and musician Monty Osewald, a colourful Daylesford character with an eventful  life story.

Nadine’s new Monty Osewald, Artist video began to take shape after Monty himself checked out her work and, duly impressed, commissioned her.

The resultant production has been enjoying a public audience at The Convent gallery in Daylesford, complementing Monty’s own most recent art exhibition that’s been staged there.

“It covers his whole life and Monty gave me a lot of background photos and artwork and the soundtrack also features his own music and also music by other local musicians,” Nadine says.

“Monty is just one of those people who is always evolving, producing new art and music. He is more modern than I am in a lot of ways even though he’s been on the earth for longer.”

Nadine says being asked to make Monty’s biographical video-doco was an honour, and after some 300 hours of work on it, she says it’s still not quite done.

“It’s about 98 percent finished.”

Nadine says  she just wants to add a little more historic detail before declaring the video 100 percent done and ready for online release.

It’s just one in a suite of current projects for Nadine Jade Productions, Nadine’s business that specialises in video production including  biographical documentary, music video and corporate work.

But Nadine has also worked on feature and short films including a notable film short that’s soon to screen as part of the St Kilda Film Festival.

This is The Job by award-winning director Tatiana Doroshenko. Nadine worked as assistant director for The Job that will feature as part of the opening of the St Kilda Film Festival on June 6.

Nadine also worked on a feature film, a thriller, shot at Glenlyon in 2021 and expected to be released later this year.

But next on the immediate horizon is a music video being made with a local band in Daylesford. This project is a little hush-hush just now but sounds pretty exciting while Nadine’s prior music videos can be checked out on YouTube.

As the mother of two teenagers, the local videographer says she generally complements her creative professional income by also working in hospitality , currently at popular local watering hole, the Radio Springs Hotel.

But despite the imperatives of parenthood, as a mature-age student Nadine made the time to also complete studies in screen and media study though RMIT.

“At the moment I’m the busiest I’ve ever been with video work,” she says.

“People want me to do the work and I’m finally at the stage where I am able to choose which projects I take on … and which I don’t .  I want my video work to feel enjoyable.”

 A fan of Danish film director and screenwriter, Lars von Trier, with a particular liking for psychological drama, Nadine says one personal goal remains to write and direct a short to target the St Kilda Film Festival.

“I have a couple of screen plays that I’ve written and I’d love to have something I’ve directed to enter into the St Kilda Film Festival. I feel like that’s the next step,” she says.

“Everything I create I write, shoot, direct, do the sound, edit. That’s what I love to do. You never know what job comes next … and I kind of like that.”

Words: Eve Lamb

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.