Marea Kozaczynski-McCaig

Marea Kozaczynski-McCaig is a Newcastle-born artist whose career reflects a lifelong passion for creativity, education, and artistic exploration.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Marea established herself as a prominent exhibiting artist, holding numerous solo exhibitions and participating widely in group shows across the Hunter region and beyond. Her work earned significant acclaim, with multiple first prizes across major regional art competitions, particularly in drawing, illustration, and still life.

Mentored by renowned gallerist Anne von Bertouch, Marea developed a distinctive style that has evolved from traditional landscapes and still life into contemporary mixed media works featuring Australiana flora, fauna, and imaginative symbolism. The legendary artist Margaret Olley once advised Marea to “be true to yourself and paint what you like: be challenged and use your imagination”—a philosophy clearly reflected in her unique and evolving practice.

Her work is held in both public and private collections internationally, including in Australia, Europe, North America, and Asia. As Marea herself reflects, “A work of art is a playground for imagination, a place to reflect your character, hopes, dreams and feelings.”

Chris Capper

Chris Capper’s meditative paintings offer a space for contemplation and reflection. His evocative compositions are careful considerations of form and space, yet are not committed to precise definition. Vibrant orbs imply flowers, while interiors are mapped in abstracted geometry, both recurring motifs throughout his works

Colour is harnessed as an emotional trigger; works bloom with a vibrant contrasting palette or are muted to convey a sense of sorrow about time passing, but with recognition for beauty and completeness. His paintings made in memorium are poignant with meaning through his deft touch.

Inhabiting a space between representation and formalist abstraction, Capper has a rare facility for the human condition that becomes poetic when he tells a story on canvas

Michael Hedger (excerpt from the catalogue essay for “Memorial, Icons and Signs”, The University Gallery, University of Newcastle)

Adele Merdjanic

Adele Merdjanic is an Australian oil painter best recognised for her vibrant brushwork that brings a dynamic energy to her compositions.

Her artistic journey began at a young age, evolving through studies at TAFE and culminating in advanced training at the National Art School in Sydney, where she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in Painting.

Adele was the winner of Best in Entire Exhibition at the 2024 Newcastle Maritime Art Prize and several of her pieces have been selected as semi-finalists in various exhibitions across Newcastle and the Hunter with works held in private collections throughout the region.

Her practice spans both landscape and figuration, distinguished by broad, structural brushstrokes that simplify details and complex scenes into evocative, impressionistic compositions with a dreamlike quality.

Giorgia Bel

Giorgia Bel (b. 1990) is a self-taught artist who began painting in 2015 during a period of illness. What began as a means of coping became a profound passion.

Bel’s practice is grounded in memory, imagination and a tender, melancholic connection to place.

 Rendered in milky, dirtied-down colour and suffused with the tones of dawn to dusk—the works evoke a drenched landscape, bursting with life and vitality. With skeletal trees and Rothko-like washes, her landscapes blend the known and imagined, guided by a philosophy of art as medicine.

Melisah May

Melisah May, an Australian artist, investigates mark making as a window into the past and future, guided by the subconscious and the expressive potential of automatism.

Through dynamic brushstrokes and experimental surfaces, her work captures the tension between containment and expansion, memory and change.

Melisah’s most recent work reflects her personal transformation, evoking the quiet chaos of transition and the interplay between reflection, uncertainty, and possibility.

ANNE REES

Anne has been a student of many well-known and prominent artists – Dr. Charles Pettinger, Rae Richards, Herman Pekel and Patrick Carroll to name but a few. Anne’s works reflect the integration of her lived experiences in urban, regional and rural environments. Her artistic media extend from watercolour to acrylics that have been exhibited in many Hunter Valley galleries including the Back to Back Gallery Cooks Hill, Lindsay Street Gallery, Forsight Gallery, Laraghy Room at Ben Ean, and Art Systems Wickham. In 1994 Anne won the Contemporary Art Section of the Dobell Exhibition. More recently, for the past 7 years, as a member of the Maitland Regional Art Society, she has entered her works in its twice a year open exhibitions and her accomplishments thereat are first prize in its 2019 Open Exhibition with two Highly Commended; and Highly Commended in 2024, with sales at most. Anne holds the degrees of Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts and Bachelor of Arts in Pure Mathematics and Economics from Newcastle University together with a Diploma in Economic Studies from that University.