Natalie Briney is one of more than 150 artists you can meet and buy work from at this year’s Margaret River Region Open Studios.
By Ara Jansen
She’s not really sure why, but the women featured in Natalie Briney’s paintings usually have white hair. They are not old though and the Margaret River artist prefers to think of them as soft but fierce.
“I just find I’m drawn to women with white hair,” says Natalie. “Maybe it’s a purity thing or maybe it just gives them this sense of peace.”
Natalie works with mixed media and texture and often uses sheet music or other old, printed pages like hymn books as the undercoat or primer for her work, covering it and revealing it as the piece demands.
“I fell in love with hand-written musical notes, which are like veins under the skin. I kept playing with that. The music also covers the canvas as I don’t like the texture of it. Then I build up from there and draw on the girls.”
Natalie is one of 151 artists who are opening their studios and their practices to the public as part of the award-winning annual Margaret River Region Open Studios event.
Taking place from September 13 to 28, visitors will be able to visit studios from Busselton to Yallingup and Dunsborough through to Cowaramup, Magaret River and Augusta.
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Almost 30 artists are taking part for the first time alongside veterans like Rebecca Cool, Christian Fletcher, Leon Pericles, Fi Wilkie and Lesley Meaney.
The artists opening their spaces are ceramicists, illustrators, furniture makers, glassmakers, installation artists, jewellers, metalwork, milliners, mixed media artists, mosaicists, painters, photographers, potters, printmakers, sculptors, textile creators, upcyclers and timber craftspeople.
All visits are free in Australia’s largest open studios event and organisers expect more than 12,000 people will hit the art trail, clocking up more than 110,000 studio visits.
Natalie says she has felt hugely encouraged by the local arts community since she settled back in Margaret River after living in the North-West for eight years. This is her fourth open studios event.
Giving up finance and administration, Natalie became a full-time artist after watching the 2014 Lindt Café siege in Sydney. It caused her to seriously reevaluate and consider what she would regret not doing with her life.
Last year, inspired by Sadako Sasaki and the Japanese story of the 1000 paper cranes, Natalie started her Geisha Collection. The pieces feature heads of geishas with white hair and those printed sheets still live underneath the work.
With a wish for peace in her heart, a paper crane has become a new and recurring theme in Natalie’s work. She’s also inspired by Gustav Klimt and Frida Kahlo and is a long time Ken Done fan.
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“Over the Christmas and New Year period of 2023/24, I was really struggling. I needed something positive, and I remembered that story.
“While she did it for different reasons, I realised I could put all my feelings of angst and what I was feeling into the work. So, I kept working out my feelings through painting.
“As artists we are pretty internal and do a lot of stuff in our heads. Painting has become my way of working through hard times. I like to think of my ladies as having a quiet strength and a sense of beauty as well. I think there’s a positive strength to the work. Sometimes I think I’m painting myself – all these different versions of myself in different forms.”
Plan your Margeret River Region Open Studios visits and find out about the artists here.
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