Our Artist: Naomi Le Get

Naomi is a printmaker who completed a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts) at Melbourne University in 1994. Naomi grew up in a passionate footy family, and gets that sport is always about so much more than a game. It’s a space where we talk about and explore family, identity and our culture.  It can also be a place of  disappointment, frustration and some very,very long waits.

She has always played as well as watched too, and remains an enthusiastic, but completely untalented sportswoman. Hence she inevitably plays on the back line of any team she’s in.

Naomi thoughts on:

Sport and Art: “There’s a lot said about sport as a religion, but I really do think the best modern equivalents of the great Renaissance religious paintings are the great sports photos. All that elation, all that despair, all that passion in those great religious paintings:- we rarely see that in religious art anymore, but it’s all there when you see Mitchell Johnson appealing for LBW, or the expressions of the losing team on Grand Final day.”

Printmaking: “I love that it’s an affordable art; it really is a people’s art. I have the privilege to own some prints by some of my favourite artists. I couldn’t do that if they were painters. But because they’re printmakers and usually worked in runs of 100 or so images, I can afford to put an original image by a great artist up on my wall”.

“Printmaking has always been a popular art in its subject matter. Japanese ukiyo-e subjects were often actors, courtesans and sumo wrestlers. The British Grosvenser School in the early 20^thC did fantastic prints showing motor racing events, horse-racing, rowing”.

Art or Graphic design?: “My background is fine art. That’s what I know best, and that’s where I usually turn for inspiration. I’ve never worked as a commercial graphic designer. It’s a world with its own gods and traditions. That’s not to say there isn’t a large amount of overlap, and certainly there’s some fantastic dedicated artists who worked only as commercial graphic designers whose work I adore such as Tom Purvis or Villemot”.

Inspirations: “My love of printmaking came from a series of Japanese artists like Okiie Hashimoto and Kiyoshi Saito who were active in the post-war period. These artists were inspired by modernists such as Matisse and Gauguin, who in turn drew much inspiration from the prints that began to flow out of Japan is the 19^th Century. It’s an artistic hall of mirrors, but they took those mirrors and reflected them back on their very local environments”.

“There’s also a fantastic history of women printmakers in Australia. Margaret Preston is the most famous, and with good reason, but I also love the work of Ethel Spowers and Dorrit Black”.