Wendy Sharpe: Many lives

About the Authors

Elizabeth Fortescue is a long time journalist starting with News Corp's Sydney headquarters in Surry Hills in 1979. She was arts editor for several papers between 2015 and 2021. She now contributes to the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald, LOOK magazine (Art Gallery of New South Wales) and Openbook magazine (State Library of New South Wales). She is a long-term Australian correspondent for London-based monthly, the Art Newspaper.

John McDonald is the art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and film critic for the Australian Financial Review. A former Head of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), he is the author of The Art of Australia: Exploration to federation (2006), among other publications. John writes for magazines and journals both at home and abroad. He has lectured widely on art and cinema, and acted as curator for a range of exhibitions, including Federation: Australian art and society, 1901-2000 at the NGA.

Justin Paton is a writer and curator from Aotearoa, New Zealand, and has been Head Curator of International Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, since 2014. He is the curator of exhibitions such as Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter and Adrian Villar Rojas: The End of Imagination (both with Lisa Catt). Justin's publications include How to Look at a Painting (Awa Press, 2005), McCahon Country (Penguin Random House New Zealand and Auckland Art Gallery, 2019) and the book of the exhibition Dreamhome (Art Gallery of NSW, 2023).

Anne Ryan is Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where she manages the collection of Australian prints, drawings and watercolours. She studied at the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales, and was the Sarah and William Holmes Scholar in the Departments of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum in 2001-02. Anne has organised a number of exhibitions and publications on historical and contemporary Australian art and artists, with a particular interest in women artists. She has curated the Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial exhibitions Drawing Out (2014), Close to Home (2016) and Real Worlds (2020) and has curated the annual Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes eight times since 2015.

Scott Bevan is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. He is the author of six books, including Battle Lines: Australian artists at war(Random House Australia, 2004), Bill: The life of William Dobell(Simon and Schuster, 2014), and The Lake (No Shush Press, 2020). He has presented and directed a number of documentaries, including The Hunter, Oll: The Life and Art of Margaret Olley and Arthur Phillip: Governor, Sailor, Spy for the ABC.

Stephanie Wood is an award-winning writer whose work appears in publications including Good Weekend magazine (the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald), the Guardian and Vogue magazine. She is the author of Fake: A Startling True Story of Love in a World of Liars, Cheats, Narcissists, Fantasists and Phonies. Stephanie has worked as an editor at newspapers including the Independent and the Daily Mail in London and the Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong. She is a former editor of the Age Good Food Guide and Epicure section. 

Wendy Sharpe is acclaimed as one of Australia's most significant and awarded artists. She has won the Archibald Prize, the Portia Geach Memorial Prize (twice) and the Sulman Prize (judged by Albert Tucker). She has received many major commissions which include Australian Official Artist to East Timor, the first woman to do so since World War II.

Wendy is known for her strong figurative paintings, her use of narrative and a sensuous use of paint. She is the quintessential romantic painter, uncompromising, dedicated and unconcerned by fad or fashion. Her work addresses timeless issues such as love, passion, human relationships and what it is like to live in the world, subjects rarely expressed today in contemporary art. Wendy Sharpe's work is based on drawing and imagination, made from intuition and experience. Her obvious understanding of drawing, composition and paint itself mean that she is often described as the painter's painter.