Dates: 4 September 2024
- 22 September 2024
Jo Reitze has painted at Ocean Grove throughout her life, mostly in school holidays. She often captured the windswept Cypresses, at Ocean Grove Beach from her culvert studio.
In COVID19, locked down in Melbourne, far from the sea, she found strength in these resilient trees that bent to survive gales. She resolved that this was her time to paint. She would not die with a bungalow full of empty frames.
Bending too, she found her iPad’s back lighting enabled her to successfully work from photographs, often taken from exposed vantage points. Their pertinence was the catalyst for the ISO project that would obsess and entertain her, inspiring a series of many paintings and drawings including this selection. All works are freely executed with lyrical, expressive mark-making, evoking the rejuvenating sea air she missed.
Lockdown has been the only period in Reitze’s life when she had uninterrupted time to paint. While others struggled, Jo felt blessed to be an artist with much to motivate and nourish.
Jo Reitze (Mrs. De Carteret) is a Fellow of Victorian Artists Society, Past President of Melbourne Society of Women Painter & Sculptors and an award-winning artist.
