Exhibitions at the Library
Image: Kathy Smoker, Soldier’s Point
KAS: Our Place Exhibition at Gordon Library
In partnership with Ku-ring-gai Art Society
Our Place invites artists and audiences to explore and celebrate the unique character of Ku-ring-gai. Its rich natural landscapes, diverse communities, and layered histories. This exhibition honours the connection between people and place, inviting reflections on the stories, memories and experiences that define Ku-ring-gai. The works were created by the artists of the Ku-ring-gai Art Society.
The Ku-Ring-Gai Art society (KAS) is a non-profit organisation, run by artists for the benefit of artists and those interested in the Arts. Founded in 1965, the Society has established and maintained a reputation for excellence, attracting artists from a wide spectrum of disciplines, covering both traditional and contemporary 2-dimensional works in all media.
Art and artist info
Anthony Liem
Anthony Liem, born in Indonesia, is a retired Architect. He studied Art as part of the Architectural Course at the University of Sydney. On retirement Anthony decided to join watercolor painting classes at the Ku-ring-gai Art Centre in Roseville in 2010. His love for painting has resulted in the various works exhibited with the Ku-ring-gai and Central Coast Art Societies. The Sydney Harbour Bridge, Opera House, General Post Office and Town Hall became his favourite subjects. Paintings of portraits of well-known Australian Artists the late David Gulpilil and Gurrumul Yunupingu were his other favourites.
His watercolor painting at the ‘Our Place’ Exhibition represents shadows at a typical Street in Ku-ring-gai. This is typical of streets in Gordon on an early summer morning. The deep and dark shadow of mature trees outline the sections that are lit by bright sunlight. The resulting effect provides the sharp contrast between light and dark emphasizing the end of the street at a distance. Apart from the deep shadows the painting also gives the impression of coolness in the shady parts of the street. The trees and surrounding bushes are full of birdlife and lizards looking to feed on native fruit and insects.
Benadictu Hur - Duck's Family
Oil on canvas
Caroline Oesterheld - Cowan Creek Lookout
Caroline Oesterheld’s paintings are inspired by the natural environment. Most weeks, she sketches with a Plein Air group and find inspirations by walking through many bush trails. This work was from the Cowan Creek Lookout, part of the Ku-ring-gai National Park.
Catherine Lowe - Residents of Ku-ring-gai
Watercolour. Ku-ring-gai is home to many beautiful birds & plants that grow profusely in the Ku-ring-gai National Park as well as in local residential parks & gardens. The Sulphur Crested Cockatoos love nothing better than to gather together to feast on those beautiful botanicals like this Gymea Lilly.
Catherine Lowe is a Sydney based award-winning watercolour artist Her love of everything in nature draws her to her preferred painting subjects. Specialising in Tropical & Australian flora & fauna, Catherine enjoys finding the joy & comedy of nature, using composition & colour to portray the beauty that is around us. She also mixes & includes other techniques & mediums - graphite, ink & pastels, to achieve different ways of making the painting tell her story. Her journey to this stage started at Ku-ring-gai Art School in Roseville.
She says, “being an avid gardener & lover of nature especially our Australian flora & fauna & living in Kuring-Gai we are spoiled for choice of subject matter.” Also, “I particularly loved trying to find ways to portray the details I saw in nature that made me smile. I wanted the viewer to enjoy that & smile too. I’d hide grubs under the leaves - always have a dead leaf or flower - nature is not perfect. Our native bird’s antics are so wonderful, I wanted to share that joy.”
Danny Liu - Native Wonders
Watercolour. Bouquet of Australian flowers.
Danny Liu is a self-taught watercolour artist located in Kariong, Central Coast. She has been practising her art seriously since 2014, and frequently exhibits with the Central Coast Watercolour Society, the Central Coast Art Society and Ku-Ring-Gai Art Society. She increased her knowledge of watercolour with Australian masters such as Chan Dissanayake and Herman Pekel, as well as Chinese masters such as Rick Huang, Liu Yi and Michelle Lin. She has been honoured with numerous prizes locally and internationally, most notably in the Women in Watercolour competition, IMWA Youth, and some IWS art competitions. She says, “I like to paint a variety of subjects, from flowers to landscapes, from birds to portraits. I can find beauty and interest in everything! Since I first started painting, I’ve tried to better share my feelings through my paintings and the emotions that I feel when looking at the subjects of my choice.
Eva Barry - Nightfall
Acrylic on gold paper. Using a gold satin finish paper with acrylic paint, the painting portrays an atmospheric moonlit forest scene with dramatic cliffs.
Eva Barry was born in 1935 in Budapest, Hungary. In 1955, she married, and a year later during the ’56 revolution, she escaped from Hungary and settled in Sydney Australia. In 1962, she joined the Orban studio and spent the next twenty years learning, drawing and painting from Desiderius Orban. After his death in 1986, she continued teaching in his studio for another twenty-five years. In 2002, she won the Lloyd Rees Prize in Lane Cove, awarded by Philip Brackenreg of Artarmon Galleries. My paintings are hung in several chamber councils, including Lane Cove and Gordon, as well as several countries all over the world.
She says, “Design is the most important element of creative art. Good design has the power to create a unity of style with good form and colour relationship. No matter what the medium is". She quotes Joseph Campbell: “You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where is a way or path, it is someone else’s path… If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realise your potential.”
Grace Bates - Dawn in the Bush
Acrylic. 'Dawn in the Bush' is as I imagine it in that stillness just as the sun is about to burst through the trees. Rofe Park, Hornsby Heights.
A semi-abstract painter, Grace Bates came into art belatedly after a long career in publishing. Initially working in watercolours, she has recently found expression in oil and acrylics. A long time exhibiting member of the Kur-ring-gai Art Society, she holds the Lou Klepac Award from the Society’s 58th Annual Art Awards Exhibition 2025.”
In line with the ‘Our place’ theme in beautiful Ku-ring-gai, her painting ‘Morning in the bush’ reflects her fascination with the Australian landscape with its unique flora and fauna, so distinctly different from the tropical environment of her childhood in the Philippines.
Kathy Smoker - Soldier's Point
Pastel. Her painting "Soldier's Point" is a painting of a sunset at Soldier's Point, Port Stephens NSW.
Kathy Smoker was born in Goulburn NSW. She had her first art lessons in the late 90’s and discovered that she loved painting and drawing. She says, “I’m never really happy with any of my paintings and I’m always trying to work out how to improve. My aim is, and has been for the last few years, to also ‘loosen up’ my paintings – I’m still trying to do both!”. Also, “painting has helped me to heal from a lot of emotional pain. It is an essential part of me. I hope to be able to paint for as long as I’m alive – to not be able to do so would be very distressing."
Linda Olstein - Bushland Creeks II
Acrylic. The painting is all about the trees and creeks around the Ku-ring-gai National Park.
Art has always played a big part in Linda Olstein’s life. She is inspired by nature, bushwalking and seeing huge eucalypts when looking out the window. I go into my studio and let my imagination flow onto the canvas. She has worked in many genres, including abstract, over the years but always goes back to landscape painting.
She says: “Living in a suburb surrounded by bushland, nature is my constant inspiration. I try to capture the play of light and shadow. The deep darks behind the trees and the dappled sunlight playing on the leaves. I like to use shapes and sometimes a palette knife to give an abstraction to the work.”
Madeline Szymanski - Bush Cathedral
Collagraph. There is often a spiritual dimension to the feelings evoked during a bushwalk.
Madeleine Szymanski has been working professionally in Australia for more than 30 years. She has been teaching and conducting workshops as well as holding solo shows and earning many awards in local, interstate and overseas exhibitions. She has always been interested in human interaction and the emotion that an artwork can evoke. At present she is working mainly in watercolour and the collagraph print, both of which can produce unusual colours and textures that often inspire new interpretations.
Margaret Vickers - The Tree that Beckoned
Watercolour. Gentle rain was falling as we walked through the local Ku-ring-gai bush. Colours were heightened. The reddish trunk of this distant tree positively glowed. It seemed to beckon us towards it. Each section was an abstract artwork – hence the segmented presentation.
She also says, “nature has provided a vast source of inspiration for my artwork. Textures, colours, shapes, tonal contrasts, landscapes and more serious issues stemming from a warming climate have all provided material for my artwork. In addition environmental issues such as land clearing, the heat/ sink effect arising from increased urbanization and the weakening of marine ecosystems have all featured in my mark making.”
“The subject of the artwork will determine what techniques will be used to create it. At times printmaking techniques will be employed such as etching, collagraphs or monoprints. Often these techniques will be used in combination with watercolours, gouache or oil pastels. On other occasions it is just the sheer beauty of a scene that is the “eyecatcher” for an artwork.”
“My marks can range from abstract to representational. Line rather than form tends to attract my eye. Creating art has fostered a genuine interest in art history.”
Peter Whitehead - My Place to Sheldon Forest
Mixed media on canvas. Ku-ring-gai living is just the best inspiration to respond to the light, colour and form of our bush on our front door.
Peter Whitehead went to Law School not Art School but through all his educational years developed his love of drawing, illustrating and painting. Peter joined the Ku-ring-gai Art Society (KAS) in the 1980s exhibiting locally and at Manly Regional Gallery. His practice has developed as a mixed media artist using prepared paper and canvas en plein air (in the open air), often using found charcoal and rapidly draw with pigmented charcoal and a limited palette of acrylic paint, oil sticks and aquarelle. Peter’s works are found in private collections but also in a 14-work commission by Department of Communities and Justice. He has been awarded numerous prizes for his art including the Glebe Open Art Prize in 2022, the First Prize for Mixed Media in the KAS Annual Awards in 2022 and 2025.
Susan Farrell - Kookaburras
Mixed media. "The meaning of Killara where I live means permanence."
Susan Farrell is a Sydney-based artist whose work reflects a lifelong engagement with drawing and painting. Working primarily in oils, she develops her paintings through a layered and responsive process, allowing each work to evolve with careful attention to tone, atmosphere and balance. Her work reflects a deep respect for the Australian landscape—its age, resilience and cultural significance—and an ongoing commitment to careful, attentive painting. Susan’s experience includes many years as a graphic artist and tutor at Ku-ring-gai Art Centre, Roseville. A long-standing member of the Ku-ring-gai Art Society, where she has served in multiple committee roles, Susan is also an Associate Artist and Councilor with the Royal Art Society of New South Wales.
Her mixed media work 'Kookaburras' explores the idea of place as something enduring - held in memory, language, and landscape. Layered textures and imagery reflect the passage of time, while the inclusion of text referencing the meaning of Killara - “permanence, always there”—anchors the piece in a deeper cultural understanding of connection to country. The kookaburras, quietly embedded within the composition, act as witnesses to this continuity. Awarded Second Prize in the Spirit of Ku-ring-gai, the work invites reflection on what it means to belong to a place that exists beyond us, yet shapes who we are.
Violetta Kurbanova - Morning Light
Watercolour. Morning light breaks through the canopy of Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, where dancing shadows and "god rays" meet. This watercolour captures the bushland’s fleeting atmosphere through deep indigo washes and ethereal, light-filled textures.
Yvonne Langshaw - Autumn in Ku-ring-gai
Acrylic on canvas. Semi abstract work combining natural and built elements.
Since 1980, Yvonne Langshaw has exhibited in solo and group shows and has taught art since 1986. She is well known for her talks, demonstrations and workshops to community art groups, and has judged many art competitions. She is listed in Max Germain Dictionary of Women Artists, 1992. Yvonne has works in public and private collections in Australia and overseas. She has also been a finalist in many art awards.
Regarding her work, she said: “I work mainly in acrylic, and sometimes use oil, gouache, watercolour and mixed media or collage, ink, charcoal, graphite and pastel. Botanical and ecological studies have led to a profound love of the world of nature in all its forms. Closer to home, I am drawn to the subjects of still life and interiors. When painting and drawing, I let the process take over which results in expressive shapes and colours in the work.
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