The art that made me: Guido Maestri

‘The fondest memories (and the most vital moments) of my early life as an artist were as a student at the National Art School [NAS],’ Sydney-based artist Guido Maestri tells Look magazine. The 2009 winner of the Archibald Prize is the guest judge of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship 2023 for Australian painters aged between 20 and 30.

Established by Beryl Whiteley in 1999, the scholarship offers young artists a formative opportunity to develop their artistic practice through residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and the Shark Island Institute in Kangaroo Valley, honouring her son Brett Whiteley’s life-changing experience of travel as a young artist, aged just 20.

For Maestri, moving from country New South Wales to Darlinghurst in inner-city Sydney to attend NAS had a similarly formative effect. ‘I immediately found my place in the world,’ says Maestri. ‘It was certainly the beginning of my life as an artist and is still part of my world today.’

Confinement to his studio during the lockdowns of the COVID pandemic had a profound effect on Maestri’s practice. Rather than working exclusively outdoors, en plein air, ‘I was forced to access landscape, or the idea of landscape, in other ways,’ says Maestri. ‘Sorting images, googling, printing, collaging, building maquettes, all became ways into a painting. The paintings, subsequently, have become fractured, reassembled glimpses of no particular place. Perhaps ironically, it is my hope that these paintings are an antidote to the fractured microsecond view of the world we now have ... to slow us down and hold our gaze as we try to piece them back together.’

I am still what I meant to be is a painting I stood in front of many times as a young painter. It is a painting that I always felt challenged to unlock. To stop, think and put ideas together about what I was looking at. It also incorporates different and disparate ways of working which I always found encouraging. It made me feel the unending openness and opportunity present in the simple act of painting – like one could never exhaust what painting can be. I still get lost trying to decipher it. I think that is the success of this work.

Aida Tomescu was the most influential painting lecturer for me at the National Art School. A powerful and thoughtful artist and teacher, she immediately challenged my notions of what painting is and could be. Patru II was the first painting of hers I saw in the flesh and standing in front of it (as I did so many times), always crystallised her words and teaching. I was astounded that a painting of such quiet gravitas could be inspired by ancient frescos and poetry. Before this, painting for me was just about observation.

My all-time favourite painter is Neo Rauch. He creates a mesmerising mix of all that painting is, was and can be; darkly whimsical mashups never to be truly understood, but powerfully felt. If painting’s purpose is to hold the viewer, Rauch’s paintings exceed my expectations. I never tire of the journey into one of Rauch’s paintings. They give a lot but never everything, and when I learned that these seemingly painstakingly preconceived paintings where actually built intuitively and unplanned, it changed the way I worked from that moment on.

This painting by the relatively unknown artist Margaret Fleming taught me so much as a student. At the time, I was struggling in class with painting tonal studies (painting all white objects by observing shadow and tone) and this painting was the key that helped me unlock the notion of warms and cools in tone. I also thought that in 1895 this may not have been a popular subject. Not a still life of game birds and rural abundance like that of its predecessors, but a dead cockatoo. I thought of it as a poignant extension of Australian landscape painting, and many years later it inspired a series of still-life paintings I made of roadkill birds found on my painting trips around the country.

A version of this article first appeared in Look – the Gallery’s members magazine