{"id":272527,"date":"2025-11-09T04:42:21","date_gmt":"2025-11-09T04:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/272527\/"},"modified":"2025-11-09T04:42:21","modified_gmt":"2025-11-09T04:42:21","slug":"australias-most-revered-painter-who-youve-never-heard-of-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/272527\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia\u2019s most revered painter who you\u2019ve never heard of"},"content":{"rendered":"

Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size<\/p>\n

Some artists see talking to journalists as a necessary evil. Aida Tomescu is not one of them. Tomescu could talk about her work and life under wet paint \u2013 and perhaps that\u2019s what she\u2019ll do, if ever the two-metre-high paintings stacked against the walls in her studio topple onto her tiny frame (perish the thought).<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s because I did not speak for 23 years in that country,\u201d she says matter-of-factly when I mention her loquaciousness. \u201cThat country\u201d was Romania, the then-Communist stronghold she left in 1979, aged 23. After a year in Greece, where she taught herself English via a dictionary and novels, Tomescu came to Australia, building a new life in free, sunny Sydney thanks to the nomination of a kind stranger, a fellow Romanian residing in Liverpool.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just the quantum of talking, though. It\u2019s that Tomescu speaks so eloquently, using such precise language \u2013 paintings are not finished, they resolve themselves; she does not have inspiration, rather, sources \u2013 and referencing the likes of Chopin and Messiaen, Flaubert and Dostoevsky, C\u00e9zanne and Titian, that you could sit and listen to her in her mellifluous Eastern European accent for hours. (Maria Stoljar did. The Talking with Painters podcaster turned up for a one-hour interview with Tomescu back in 2017. Eight hours and some parking ticket jitters later, she was still there.)<\/p>\n

This is a significant time to be speaking with Tomescu. Last month, she turned 70, and five months earlier, in May, she marked 45 years in Sydney. \u201cI used to always celebrate the anniversary of my arrival in Australia,\u201d she says, surrounded by paintings in her Rosebery studio. \u201cWherever I was in the world I would sit and have a glass of wine, or a Campari, to Australia.\u201d This year, however, she forgot. \u201cI was here,\u201d she says, waving her hands around. \u201cI realised a day or two later. So I guess I celebrated differently, by working.\u201d<\/p>\n

That busy period was the lead-up to her first Sydney exhibition in three years, to open next Friday at Fox Jensen Gallery in Alexandria. It will feature more than a dozen paintings, including three towering triptychs, at least two diptychs of similar scale, and five smaller works. It\u2019s only the second solo show since the gallery reopened in new, expanded premises a few months ago, and the first in the new space for an Australian artist, at a gallery largely dedicated to international ones.<\/p>\n

\"Aida<\/p>\n

Aida Tomescu aged 18, during her student\u00a0years in Romania. She says the rigour and discipline of her training in Bucharest is the bedrock of her practice.Credit: Courtesy of the artist<\/p>\n

While you\u2019d expect co-owner Andrew Jensen to talk up his artist, he nevertheless nails something about Tomescu as he does so. \u201cHer work transcends the vitiating forces of fashion and dispenses with the current allure for political science 101 that grips so much of what is made today,\u201d he says. Jensen says this not to \u201centirely\u201d denigrate the popular political narrative, but \u201cto say that great painting, as is the case for music and poetry, leaves the manoeuvring to others. What Aida chooses to leverage is a deep knowledge and consequential feeling for poetry, literature and music \u2013 and art.\u201d<\/p>\n

With more than 40 solo exhibitions to her name, Tomescu\u2019s work features in most major public and many private collections nationwide. She\u2019s also shown offshore, most recently through Flowers Gallery, which took her to the print fair at New York\u2019s Armory in March and has also shown her in London and Hong Kong. It\u2019s a sign of her standing that the big canvases in her upcoming show will sell for $100,000 to $300,000 a pop.<\/p>\n

I go from show to show, cycle of painting to cycle of painting. I don\u2019t think much of the future, nor of the past.<\/p>\n

Is she one of Australia\u2019s most revered abstract painters? Living painters? Female painters? Probably all three. Surprising, then, that Aida Tomescu is not a household name. While she\u2019s won a suite of Art Gallery of NSW prizes \u2013 the Sulman, the Wynne and the Dobell \u2013 that was back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She\u2019s also yet to publish a monograph, unlike even the most emerging of young artists. And while she\u2019s had terrific solo shows at Orange Regional Gallery and the Drill Hall in Canberra, she\u2019s yet to be given one by a top state or national institution.<\/p>\n

\"Aida<\/p>\n

Aida Tomescu at Constanta on the Black Sea, in 1970. Between the ages of four and seven she spent a lot of time there with her grandmother.Credit: Courtesy of the artist<\/p>\n

Perhaps it reflects the lot of older artists in a culture ever thrusting towards the new, and the relative rarity of solo public shows for living Australian artists anyway. Particularly abstract artists, who are still not as popular here as figurative ones. And painters, at a time when art is often anything but things you hang on a wall. It may reflect, too, that Tomescu is of here but also, very much, of elsewhere. She\u2019s neither overtly seeking to depict this country, nor using any of its regular tropes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a Romanian-born artist who turned into an Australian painter,\u201d is how she puts it.<\/p>\n

To arrive at Tomescu\u2019s studio is to be overwhelmed by the senses. The smell is glorious \u2013 if you like aroma de wet paint (I know, I shouldn\u2019t) \u2013 but it\u2019s the sight that really hits you. Everywhere you look are massive canvases covered in thick red and white paint, some yellow and other shades in there, too. Drips, splotches, accidents, and areas with no or very little paint at all. The works are both similar and different.<\/p>\n

\"Aida<\/p>\n

Aida Tomescu in her studio in 2019. She builds her paintings up over many years, through a process that involves painting and scraping back.Credit: Jenni Carter<\/p>\n

Almost everything about Tomescu\u2019s practice defies easy assumptions. Her works might suggest velocity but she builds them up painstakingly over many years via a process that involves painting, scraping off, painting some more. She works on a few at once and constantly looks for links between them. The paintings tell her when they\u2019re finished. They may look like an emotional outpouring but they\u2019re anything but \u2013 such a state would make her lose the clarity essential to her work. \u201cPeople relate to red as a colour of anger or passion, they see many things in red but it will never be that for me,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s similar to music. Music is not about emotions but it amplifies the emotion in us.\u201d As to sources \u2013 Messiaen was one for this show \u2013 she says the whole point of art is to \u201ctravel the distance away from the artist, from their private life, to become something of its own, with its own, new identity. If there\u2019s a source it will have been transformed in the process until it becomes irrelevant.\u201d<\/p>\n

She used to be in the studio until all hours but has made a concerted effort more recently to protect her health. \u201cI used to paint through the night, without a mask or gloves or barrier cream, and on top of it, chain-smoke,\u201d she says. Ill health forced her to adopt all three, and open the windows more. While she\u2019s still learning to take days off \u2013 \u201cthis does not come naturally for a painter\u201d \u2013 she recovers after a big show by travelling to Europe to revisit her favourite works in the Louvre, at London\u2019s National Gallery and in Venice, home to some of her favourite Titians.<\/p>\n

\"Aida<\/p>\n

Aida Tomescu with her mother Ecaterina at the Frari in Venice. Ecaterina came to visit Tomescu in Sydney in 1987, and never left.Credit: Courtesy of the artist<\/p>\n

Tomescu bought this studio in 2018, partly because of its four-metre-high ceilings. But a curious thing happened when she moved in. \u201cI thought I\u2019d need a number of months to set up but I found myself sitting on the floor with the boxes all around me, and starting to paint smaller works.\u201d It was more than six months later that she started ordering larger canvases. To Jensen, her growing scale reflects not just the bigger studio but also her adopted home country. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine if she was still in Romania that she\u2019d be painting six-metre triptychs,\u201d says Jensen. \u201cThe tone and chromatic intensity is probably something that\u2019s been quietly infected by being in Australia, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

We leave the studio and head to Potts Point, the inner-city area Tomescu has lived for her entire Australian life. This is where we first met, when we lived in the same Elizabeth Bay apartment block. She cut then, as she does now, an ethereal figure, all alabaster skin and red lipstick, dressed more often than not in a long skirt, buttoned up shirt and cardigan. Her mother, Ecaterina, lived with her then, having arrived for a six-month visit in 1987 and never left. Like her daughter, she was beautiful, and like her daughter, impeccably dressed. She lived with Tomescu until her death in 2010 of a heart attack, just shy of her 83rd birthday. \u201cShe created all the circumstances for me to be a painter without knowing it,\u201d Tomescu says.<\/p>\n

Ecaterina was inclined to bouts of melancholy when Tomescu was growing up, which she presumes was because of her father, who drank too much and womanised too much and dearly wanted to escape Communism (Ecaterina eventually left him when Tomescu was 16. He died a couple of years after Tomescu left Romania; her sister, about whom she doesn\u2019t want to talk, is also no longer alive). Ecaterina was a pharmacist whose job took her around the country, so young Aida was regularly sent to stay with her grandmother in Constanta on the Black Sea. With no toys nor other children to play with, Tomescu was given sketching tasks by her grandmother, also a distant woman. Back in Bucharest, her mother took her occasionally to visit an uncle, who painted reproductions of works he\u2019d bought. \u201cI couldn\u2019t work out why the originals were so alive, and his copies carried nothing of that,\u201d Tomescu says. \u201cI would discuss this with my mother on the way home.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Aida<\/p>\n

Aida Tomescu\u2019s Messiaen III, which will feature in her first Sydney exhibition in three years, opening this month.Credit: Jenni Carter<\/p>\n

At age 10 she started going to art school on top of regular school, and by 1977 had a diploma of art from Bucharest\u2019s Institute of Fine Arts, where she learnt to paint using plaster casts and life models. \u201cI will be forever grateful for the Romanian education system of that time, for being so rigorous and disciplined,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s still the foundation of my work.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she came to Australia she undertook a postgraduate diploma of art while working for the Department of Immigration and later taught at the National Art School. She was painting and exhibiting at the same time and, six years in, managed to save enough to buy her first apartment. Not that it was driven by financial concerns; she knew that unlike in Europe, renting here would leave her open to being kicked out, which would disrupt her time in the studio.<\/p>\n

It was successful exhibitions in the late 1980s at Coventry Gallery in Paddington that elevated her status. Surprisingly, this left her depressed. \u201cEverything changed around me. People thought I would change, but I didn\u2019t.\u201d She began questioning what it was that made people buy her work. Success, she concluded, is better for the family and friends of artists than for the artists themselves.<\/p>\n

\"Aida<\/p>\n

Aida Tomescu\u2019s Double Violetta. Her paintings often feature red but she says she is not a colourist, and that her use of red hues does not signify passion or fury.Credit: Jenni Carter<\/p>\n

That said, money does help, and she\u2019s successfully lived off her art for more than two decades. She\u2019s known to be demanding on her dealers \u2013 some might say that\u2019s an understatement \u2013 which has led to some cases of falling-out, about which she is iron willed. \u201cRelationships end when they dispense with dialogue, when a gallery excludes the artist\u2019s views, when they no longer share the same values,\u201d she says. \u201cThe problem for most artists is not that they are \u2018too difficult\u2019, it\u2019s that they are too trusting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tomescu did much of the cooking in her household when growing up but her mother took over domestic duties when she moved in with her. \u201cThe studio was my domain, and the house became hers. When I came home, I\u2019d ring the doorbell.\u201d When her mother died, she couldn\u2019t get her head around her not existing any more. \u201cMy days and travels stayed exactly the same, except for the heartbreaking reality that she was no longer there.\u201d She\u2019s had relationships over the years but says she never wanted to marry any of the men she had them with, and that while she\u2019s fondly observant of children, she would not want to have to mind one.<\/p>\n

\"Aida<\/p>\n

Aida Tomescu in her Rosebery studio. She turned 70 this year, and celebrated 45 years in Sydney.Credit: Steven Siewert<\/p>\n

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For Tomescu, life is, and always has been, about the art. \u201cI go from show to show, cycle of painting to cycle of painting,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t think much of the future, nor of the past.\u201d In this respect, growing up in Romania was useful. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a place of high expectations, and that\u2019s good for a painter. You don\u2019t work for the exhibition, you don\u2019t work for the success, you certainly don\u2019t work for the financial rewards. You work for the painting, and the only expectations you have are for the work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Messiaen runs from November 15 to December 20 at Fox Jensen Gallery in Alexandria.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size Some artists see talking to journalists as a necessary evil.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":268189,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-272527","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}