Workshops

Tricia Reust has been drawing since she was very young, and is happiest when portraying people. The second eldest of eight children, she was the "family artist" and the winning of an art award with a drawing of Lassie at the age of eleven cemented this categorisation in the family and the conviction of becoming an artist in her heart. She has no trouble finding something beautiful in faces and gestures and in the incredibly fascinating way that bodies are structured and work.

When her four children were young she found it easier to draw rather than paint, and didn't resent the interruptions when these calls to minister to loved ones didn't result in the wasting of and drying out of materials that is incurred with painting - she looks on these years as a constant opportunity for study that helped form a discipline upon which she still relies. Tricia draws or paints or prepares surfaces or reads or talks art every day. Pastel is the favoured medium with which she has worked for over thirty years.

Tricia has always been involved in the art community and is committed to promoting the arts as a necessary element in education. A decision to focus more on her own art work ten years ago, and the creation of a dedicated studio space in 1998 has resulted in a move towards a professional career, incorporating teaching, continued learning opportunities and exhibitions. She considers the awards she has attained in competitions as the "authority" underpinning her teaching, as she has never completed many attempts at courses of study ( including art school, teachers' college and uni ) and feels called to share the techniques and principles she has adopted through a sometimes very frustrating search for knowledge. A mixed media course with Judith White proved a revelation, and provided the "loose" counterbalance necessary to the concentration and focus associated with her portrait commissions and life study work.

She continues to explore and share the freeing experience of mixed media, though remains caught up in the challenge of communicating the grace and strength of the human body and the beauty and wonder and character of individual people.

The development of a visual language that successfully communicates these messages of discovered beauty is a life long goal.

Tricia is available for workshops and demonstrations.

Unit 14/1 Bremner Road, Rothwell, Qld, 4022