Before the Fall 1991
Oil on canvas
Winner - Blake Art Prize 1991

Rosemary Valadon creates a dynamic space for female presence and self-identity that is powerfully generative and productive.

- Rod Pattenden

Rosemary Valadon
artworks biography essay exhibitions links rosemary's garden contact

Rosemary Valadon is an award winning Australian artist (the Blake Religious Art Prize, Portia Geach Portrait Prize, Muswellbrook Art Prize, amongst others). She is a regular finalist in the Archibald, Sulman, Blake, Portia Geach and Mosman prizes. Her career spans 35 years, and survey Shows of her work were held at the Macquarie University Gallery and the Manning Regional Art Gallery, Taree, in 2006 and 2007.

Valadon is represented in major Australian collections including BHP Billiton, National Portrait Gallery, Uniting Church, Macquarie University Gallery, Bathurst and Muswellbrook Regional Galleries, Art Bank, and private collections in Australia and overseas.

Her interest in the ‘feminine’ and depictions of women throughout the ages has been a major focus of her work. From the award winning Before the Fall ( Blake Religious Art Award 1991, to the depiction of Australian women as archetypal figures in the Goddess series, painting notable people such as Germaine Greer, Ruth Cracknell, Blanche d’Alpuget, Noni Hazlehurst. This series was followed by a deeply personal psychological study of the ‘feminine’ in works such as Girl on a Swing, and All in the Mind (contained in the Finding the Feminine section of this website). In the early 2000’s her attention turned to Fairytales, and paintings based on the Cinderella theme, and the Wolf theme (in Three Little Pigs, and Red Riding Hood), started to appear. From the mid 2000’s her work has been centered around the experience of living in Hill End where she moved in 2005 and built a studio – the landscape, figures there, and still life’s capturing the richness of this experience.

In 2009, Valadon is the first artist-in-residence at the Justice and Police Museum in Sydney. She is researching the history and depictions of women and crime, and in particular the place of the ‘femme fatale’ in pulp fiction and our society. A new body of work will develop from this residency.