Paintings and prints

“I wasn’t going to live here but it was too good to leave,” Pat says reflectively. Now she is the representative artist of the region. Though Pat and her son Mark work in different spaces on the same property and share a lifetime of dedication to their art, their styles are distinctively different. Pat paints in oils and works with pastels. If she wasn’t the first artist in Melbourne to use pastels as a medium, she was certainly the first to teach pastel drawing. Melbourne was always her base to work and teach until Mark relocated to Apollo Bay around 1990. At first Pat divided her time between the city and the coast, but found it too hard to paint in two places.

Until she came to Apollo Bay Pat loved the nude as a subject. She taught life drawing with the C.A.E. and she had exhibited for more than 40 years with the figure as her subject. “I hadn’t done any landscape before I got here,” she says, but the power and beauty of the natural forms all around Apollo Bay have become her new muse. The hills, the harbour and the sea are constant subjects in a large body of work. The gallery and studios at 12 Montrose Avenue, just a short walk from the market, provide instant proof of Pat’s prolific energies. Her paintings are a long chronicle of the endless beauty to be found along the coast and the Otway hills behind.

A tireless artist, Pat works Monday to Friday, usually starting with a little gardening to give her mind the time to consider the challenges of the canvas, some yoga, then paints till 4 o’clock or so. Saturday is market day but Sundays are free. Pat is always available to show visitors her work and Mark’s in the beautiful natural light of their gallery, a space worth a visit in itself.

Painting, prints and etchings

Mark loves what he does. Very few people can say their day begins every morning at 4.30, but he can. Summer or winter, every day starts with some exercise, then a long walk along the beach with the two family dogs for an hour and a half to be back in time to make 7 o’clock breakfast. By 8.30 he’s painting; by 4.00 the working day is usually done. But with Mark you sense he would paint in his sleep if he could.

Where his mother Pat uses soft pastels for her studies and oils for her paintings, Mark uses oil pastels and acrylic paints. Where Pat stays faithful to natural colours in her landscapes, Mark finds a new spectrum. His style is all his own, as spectacular and as energetic as the wild coast he paints but not strictly representative of it. By contrast, his etchings have a quiet serenity about them that finds a stillness in their subjects.

It was Mark who led the way to Apollo Bay. He would take breaks from running a health food bakery in Melbourne by coming down to Separation Creek, always with his art supplies. A holiday for him meant painting and drawing. At Separation Creek he loved the fact that he could set up on the veranda and paint all he could see for as long as he wanted.

Holidays would never be long enough for his appetite for art. The next step would be to permanently move to the wild west coast. He found the house at 12 Montrose Avenue and Pat first came down to visit and stay. Two years of that and Pat relocated for good. As artists and as family, their lives complement each other without overlapping. And, as artists, they have the advantage of a different set of eyes casting over their work and the time to talk about what they’re doing. Most artists would envy them.

Paintings, prints and sculpture

James Butt is a deeply divided man. He wants to lock himself away for months to write and record music but spends his days painting and drawing; he wants to make more sculptures but is intensely working on woodblock prints of layered textures. Time isn’t big enough for his creative impulses.

Born in Colac, James was first inspired by his parents’ mudbrick house at Elliminyt. Lyn’s intuitive sense of interior design nurtured his sense of beauty; fishing with John and walking the forests and beaches in easy reach of their home gave James experiences that have been his companions ever since.

Although he submitted a folio of drawings in Year 10 that found him a place in a Gifted Children’s workshop at the Victoria College of the Arts, James remembers loving to make kites, scarf parachutes and spears as a child, simple sculptural forms. After the first year in his Fine Arts degree at RMIT, James swapped painting for sculpture but has too many attractions to settle on any one particular medium.

He moved to Apollo Bay in 1989, eventually settling at Tanybryn, deep and high in the Otways, turning an old dairy into a studio using recycled timber and mud bricks. There he concentrated on his music, writing some 50 to 60 songs and frequently recording. He continues to perform, record and write music.

James now lives with his partner Jayne and daughter Ruby on a farm on the fringe of town. Once again his studio is a converted dairy. He has many passions but for now he’s immersed in the mixed media woodblock print process. “It’s a satisfying process with an inventive painterly aspect, combined with the sharp definition of print design,” he says. “I like the layered effect, like sea and landscape with a spacious, almost surreal Australian ambience.” James uses a variety of salvaged timbers, including old boat wrecks and discarded off-cuts, finding that the wood grain and imperfections become part of the designs.

James is a market regular and performs regularly at The Apollo Bay Music Festival.