Top shelf: Victoria Reichelt

The Big Twitch, oil painting by Victoria Reichelt

At Inside Out, we've been fans of Queensland-based artist Victoria Reichelt for a long, long time. We've featured her beautifully precise paintings of time-worn objects in several issues - and we were pleased to discover her Snowdomes painting (as seen on our Editor's Choice page in Jan/Feb 2008) has since been acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery (and importantly for anyone who secretly hoped to lug the picture home, the image is available as a gift card in the souvenir store).



Although her canvases have depicted everything from vintage suitcases to artists' bookshelves - they have one thing in common. They portray a colourful and detailed debate about "the death of painting" and painting's relationship with photography.

"When photography was invented in the 1800s, it was perceived to be a real threat to the painting," explains Victoria. "But the cameras I depict in my paintings are antiques - and have themselves been made redundant. Superseded by new technologies, they now are nothing more than collector's items."


Optiscope, oil painting by Victoria Reichelt

"That makes these artworks a big contradiction, because these cameras were meant to be the death of painting, but now over 100 years later – as a contemporary painter – I'm using them as the basis to make paintings (a medium that has endured and thrived)."

"So with these objects, I am looking at the ongoing tension between painting and photography, and the ever-changing balance of power between the two ways of making images."


David Sequeira, oil painting by Victoria Reichelt

"The other work I am making at the moment is paintings of bookshelves - books being another object under threat from new technologies."

"These works are a paradox to paint - as once the books are an image on canvas, they are shut forever and can never be read. In a painting, they serve a very different purpose from their intended function – they are purely objects like the others I paint and you’re forced to judge them by the covers."



Alasdair MacIntyre, oil painting by Victoria Reichelt

"While some of these bookshelf paintings are of random books, I’ve recently done a series that are portraits of people. So I’d go to their houses, photograph their bookshelves and then make paintings from the photos as a way of telling the viewer about the person." (The shelf above, for instance, belongs to Brisbane-based artist Alasdair MacIntyre.)


Installation pictures from the 2008 exhibition Bibliomania: The Bookshelf Portrait Project at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts in St Kilda, Melbourne

"This was a different way to do a portrait - because the decisions people make about the books they choose to buy, keep and display, reveals a lot about them. It offers a deeper insight into their interests and inspirations, and in the case of the Australian artists I painted, a deeper insight into their practices."



Or, to sum it up like a pithy blurb from a book, "I get inspiration from beautiful overlooked objects and I love painting them and giving them a new privileged existence!" says Victoria.



You can see Victoria Reichelt's work in person at an upcoming exhibition in November at Dianne Tanzer gallery in Melbourne or through her lovely (and in-no-way-superseded) website.

Lee Tran, deputy chief sub-editor