During her time at Studio Simi,Tippett was seduced by Vermeer and Rembrandt. She developed an ability to paint without brushstroke markings. She became very excited by her new technique and continues this method today. Tippett also received a gift of a great skill from Simi: a method of making charcoal from a plant (a necessary process during the war-torn years in Italy). The method involved breaking a twig from a tree branch at a moment of critical maturation, binding it, immobilising it and burning it in a fire. 

There are direct correlations between the drawings and the oil paintings of the same titles in the exhibition. The compositions vary little from drawing to painting. It is surprising to discover that several drawings were completed after their oil counterpart. Tippett is a fast painter but her painting process is slow. She sketches out in charcoal on linen, scrubs in the tones roughly starting with the darkest and then through the application of four to six layers of paint she tightens and resolves the image, seeing more with each layer. 

Pam Tippett has not exhibited widely. In fact this is her first solo exhibition in nineteen years. Her personal path has led her to teaching science and maths in Papua New Guinea in the mid 1970s.This followed her completion of a Diploma of Education, but she was diverted by the desire to study painting in Italy. 

The artist recently returned to painting still life after focussing on portraiture for many years and exhibiting from 1992 to 1997 in the Portia Geach Portrait Award for women artists held annually at the SH Ervin Gallery. Her new still life works have surfaces of smooth, unbroken paint application. Her compositions are uncomplicated: as humble as four simple oranges, a bowl of eggs or a gourd. The space surrounding the subjects is free and uncluttered. There is little detail in the background. 

The vessel. a favourite subject of still life painters, is the subject of two paintings by Tippett. Her vessels are not lame, undignified salutes to Giorgio Morandi. 

Many such slavish renditions of Morandi-esque vessels can be seen shamelessly decorating the walls of galleries, homeware and design shops and contribute banal dioramas in Ikea and Freedom. Instead, Tippett's vessels seen in Chinese and Three jugs are less a study in quivering illusion and more a celebration of the vessel itself and its lustrous surface, loyally and painstakingly rendered. 

Tippett refers to herself as a simple, uncomplicated person and upon first glance her fruit and vegetable paintings may appear so too. But, as always, there potency in understatement. Her simplicity suggests complexity. Her unbroken surfaces and restrained brushstrokes contribute to a suspicion that within the gourd gourd there is a pulsating, throbbing life source. For the viewer there is a desire to break open the gourd and feast on its flesh, crush the eggs in the palm of the hand and delight in its wobbling yolk or bite into the pears and the dribbling juices. 
 
There is little obvious movement in her still life works.This is perhaps accentuated by the continuity of composition through the subject placement towards the back of the marble slab in almost every painting. But there is a sense of latent action. Her onions are quite still but the most tender of breezes could launch delicate outer sheath into the air. There is also a sense of imminent action with the bread, cut for several people, in anticipation of a shared lunch. 

The genre of still life appeals to artists such as Tippett as it involves seeing the beautiful in the mundane Fruit, jugs, watering cans are everyday, simple objects which become beautiful. It is a beauty which pleases and delights. 
 
Successful still life paintings are capable of suggesting some thing more than just beauty. Tippett's ritualistic three candles, lit but barely illuminating their sombre background, dance in a frenzy and the pewter candlestick holder with Iit candle and two spent matches may have appealed to the artist as just that, but they can not but be part of a narrative of implied drama. 
 
The most mysterious effect of Tippett's work is their quality of being more real than reality. Her textures are almost too tactile to believe the peach skin is velvet, the eggshell is porcelain. This is a direct result of Tippett's long, earnest contemplation of the subject. She stares and stares for days and weeks at her subject, boring beneath their surfaces. What the viewer sees when looking at a peach or an egg becomes highly detailed, microcosmic and even visceral when seen through the intense gaze of Pam Tippett. 
 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

1950    Born in Lismore, New South Wales 
1977-80  Studied drawing and painting at Studio Simi (Nerina Simi) in Florence Italy. This  was an intensive and rigorous training course using traditional techniques in the study of still life, the figure and portraits. 

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 
1978    Badia Fiesolana, Florence, Italy 
1981    Mackay Harrison Gallery, Ballina, New South Wales 
1983    Mackay Harrison Gallery, Ballina, New South Wales 
            Istituto Culturale di San lacopo, Florence, Italy 
            Lamourache, Levignac de Guyenne, France 
 2002   Australian Painting and Sculpture, Australian Galleries, Sydney 
            Australian Painting and Sculpture, Australian Galleries, Melbourne 

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 
1988, 90          Doug Moran National Portrait Prize 
1992, 94, 95, 96, 97  Poroa Geach Portrait Prize 
1998, 2000         SCEGGS Redlands Westpac Art Prize 
2001   Australian Painting and Sculpture Australian Galleries Sydney 

COLLECTIONS 
Represented in private collections in Australia and overseas 
 

Photography: Jenni Carter, Sydney 
 

Prue Davidson, March 2002