Vernon Treweeke (1939 – 19 March 2015) was an Australian psychedelic artist. He has been termed the "father of psychedelic art in Australia". In the late 1960s he was deemed to be "Australia's leading practitioner of abstract eroticism." He was married to Riri Treweeke and has five children, including his sons Luke(jazz virtuoso pianist), born in 1967, whose mother is the Australian Artist Wendy Paramor, Swift, born 1979, a musician, a fellow painter, and a label owner (http://www.passengerofshit.com/bio.html), and Julian and Yiani, also musicians, all of which Vern has collaborated with. His work is held in various Australian and international collections, including the

National Gallery of Australia The National Gallery of Australia (NGA), formerly the Australian National Gallery, is the national art museum of Australia as well as one of the largest art museums in Australia, holding more than 166,000 works of art. Located in Canberra in th ...

and the

National Gallery of Victoria The National Gallery of Victoria, popularly known as the NGV, is an art museum in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is Australia's oldest and most visited art museum. The NGV houses an encyclopedic art collection across two ...

Early life

Treweeke grew up in

Sydney Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about towards the Blue Mountain ...

, Australia. He attended boarding school at Scots School in Bathurst where he became a close friend of

Brett Whiteley Brett Whiteley AO (7 April 1939 – 15 June 1992) was an Australian artist. He is represented in the collections of all the large Australian galleries, and was twice winner of the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes. He held many exhibitions ...

. From 1957 to 1959 he studied painting, drawing and sculpture at the Australian National Art School under John Passmore and Lyndon Dadswell. In 1961 he travelled to London via India and France. Whilst in London in 1962 he was included in the prestigious "Young Commonwealth Artists" exhibition that toured Germany, France and England. While in London he associated with many expatriate Australian artists including Michael Johnson, Tony McGillick and Wendy Paramor, and the English artists,

David Hockney David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists o ...

and

Patrick Caulfield Patrick Joseph Caulfield, (29 January 1936 – 29 September 2005), was an English painter and printmaker known for his bold canvases, which often incorporated elements of photorealism within a pared-down scene. Examples of his work are ''Po ...

Career

In 1966 Treweeke returned to Sydney via New York and San Francisco. In the late 1960s Treweeke regularly showed his work at Central Street Gallery in Sydney. His work of this time can be seen as developing a prototype for methods of exhibition practice that have subsequently become known as installation, multi-media and electronic art. A typical Treweeke exhibition during the Central Street years included silkscreen images on modular canvas panels coated in fluorescent paint, a sound component and then the whole space would be saturated in ultraviolet neon light. By 1970 Treweeke had abandoned his increasingly high-profile career as an artist. His lifelong interest in beat culture; exotic religions and alternative lifestyles eventually led him to the town of Nimbin. In 1973 Treweeke was instrumental in organizing the

Aquarius Festival The Nimbin Aquarius Festival was a counter-cultural arts and music festival organised by the Australian Union of Students. It was the fourth in a biannual series of festivals, first organised by the National Union of Australian University Stude ...

. Until his death in 2015, he lived in the Blue Mountains west of

, where he painted murals on several of the stations on the Blue Mountains railway line, which feature elements of local folklore. In 2003 a major exhibition of his work, the first in 30 years, was exhibited at Penrith Regional Gallery in Western Sydney. In June 2010, an exhibition of his work was exhibited at CarriageWorks, centre for contemporary arts and culture, in Eveleigh, Sydney.

Death

Treweeke died 19 March 2015.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Treweeke, Vernon 1939 births 2015 deaths Australian painters Australian erotic artists