in-room artwork at River Drive Motel

in-room artwork

room 1

Above Dining table

Tiarna Herczeg
Dajali, 2022
Acrylic on Birch
65 x 70cm

Tiarna Herczeg is a proud Kuku Yalanji and Hungarian artist living on Gadigal lands. Their practice is intuitive and instinctive, and they often paint without a direct idea, instead using their practice as a ritual for connecting to Country.

Herczeg’s approach comes from a sense of urgency regarding their spiritual and cultural identity. Herczeg disconnects from the idea of painting an artwork and instead taps into a deeper spirituality. Fearless, loose and gestural brush strokes emerge amongst vibrant colours to create organic compositions that highlight the familiar, rich and natural Country. Their practice is a spiritual exchange of energy between artist and artwork, guided by cultural intuition. What remains is a sacred depiction of Country that cannot be told by anyone else.

herczegtiarna.com
@tiarna.herczeg

On Desk

Darren Frisina
No Junk Mail, 2021
Oil on panel
25 x 25 cm

Darren currently lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. He is an emerging artist, working primarily in oils. With a background in graphic design, his goal is to create a simple statement for each composition through the use of colour, shape and texture. Darren enjoys finding daily life subjects and scenes that may often be overlooked but once caught in the paint, can provide a pleasing snapshot or memory of a time and place.

www.pencilfury.com
@pencilfury

On wall above single bed

Sam Steinhauer
Pasta You Can Rely On, 2022
Acrylic and flashe on board
40 x 50cm

Sam Steinhauer
Shapeless Like A Thumb, 2022
Acrylic and flashe on board
40 x 50cm

Sam Steinhauer is a Northern Rivers based artist working on the unceded lands of the Arakwal people of the Bundjalung Nation. His work explores the interplay of art and the everyday. Sam constructs nonsensical scenes using his own personal photographs as well as imagery from pop-culture. This re-purposing of personal experiences into a flattened picture plane creates an introspective space for Sam where he explores his ‘disenchantment with the Western world’, while finding ‘humour in the banality of it all’. He holds a 1st class honours degree in Art History.

@streetshebowka

artwork above dining table

room 2

Above Couch

Sam Steinhauer
Pasta You Can Rely On, 2022
Acrylic and flashe on board
40 x 50cm

Sam Steinhauer is a Northern Rivers based artist working on the unceded lands of the Arakwal people of the Bundjalung Nation. His work explores the interplay of art and the everyday. Sam constructs nonsensical scenes using his own personal photographs as well as imagery from pop-culture. This re-purposing of personal experiences into a flattened picture plane creates an introspective space for Sam where he explores his ‘disenchantment with the Western world’, while finding ‘humour in the banality of it all’. He holds a 1st class honours degree in Art History.

@streetshebowka

Michael Mitsas
Feel Good, (n.d.)
100% silk crepe de chine
63 x 63cm

Michael Mitsas is a Melbourne based self-taught artist who works across a diverse range of mediums. Michael believes that creativity is not only a privilege for a minority but is a natural state that everyone has the aptitude to submit to. Michael has created his own personal language influenced predominantly by primitive art and abstract expressionism in which he uses vibrant colours, abstraction, mythology, and symbolism to project a narrative of his inner world. He uses art as a medium to personify the playful and instinctual side of creating that he feels everyone has the ability to connect to.

@michael_mitsas

Above single bed

The Seven Seas
On My Mind, 2021
Acrylic, enamel, flocking & oil marker on timber
33.5 x 22.5cm

The Seven Seas is a Melbourne based multidisciplinary artist working in illustration and sculpture. He works across many styles from figurative to abstract work, always with a focus on bold colours and large forms. The Seven Seas explores woodworking, casting and illustration techniques to represent his recurring cast of characters and forms reflecting memories, thoughts and travels.

@the_seven_seas

in dressing room

Artist Unknown
Title unknown [embroidered orange flowers], (n.d.)
Tapestry on board
43 x 34cm

artwork above couch

room 3

Above dining table

Jill Daniels
Bhunagajini, born 1959
Mustering, 2022
Acrylic on linen, framed
60 x 60cm

Jill Daniels is a Bhunagajini woman, born and living in Ngukurr. She started painting in 2003 after her sister, renowned artist, Amy Johnson, introduced her to the Ngukurr Arts Centre. After a brief break from painting, she tried other jobs, but soon returned to the arts centre and the job she liked best, painting. Jill Daniels paintings are mostly landscape and ocean scenes, and she particularly loves telling stories about stockmen and their adventures on the land.

Ngukurr is a thriving remote Aboriginal community located off the banks of Roper River in South East Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. It is a place of creativity and collaboration, and home to seven language and cultural groups including; Ngalakgan, Alawa, Mangarrayi, Ngandi, Marra, Warndarrang, Nunggubuyu, Ritharrngu-Wägilak, and Rembarrnga. Together, these clans are known as Yugul Mangi. This distinctive group have made Ngukurr renowned for their truly unique artworks which recontextualise and experiment with style and technique.

ngukurrarts.com

@ngukurrarts

Beside bunk bed:

Anouk van der Vorst
Stranded, 2022
Printed photograph
14.5 x 20.5cm

Anouk van der Vorst, a self-taught photographer hailing from The Netherlands and currently based in Melbourne, captures the beauty of everyday things in her work. Her photographs explore accidental still lifes, the slowness of motherhood, and moments of calm amidst an otherwise chaotic world. Through her lens, Anouk offers a fresh perspective on the world and encourages viewers to take a moment to appreciate the often-overlooked beauty in the ordinary.

@anoukvdvorst

On wall adjacent to Queen bed

Chloe A Smith (I Make Soft Food)
Chico Roll, 2022
Printed photograph
42 x 29.7 cm

Chloe Smith is an artist of Chinese and Papua New Guinean heritage who practises under the pseudonym, I Make Soft Foods. She is currently based in Bundjalung country on the South Coast of NSW, but was born in Queensland and spent nearly a decade in Melbourne. The combination of spending many formative years in the food obsessed city and growing up in a food obsessed family, her artwork veered toward creating food - or more specifically, Soft Food.

Chloe uses felt as a medium to stage still lives of everyday items. She works meticulously to get the texture right, sometimes taking months to get the proposed result. Her works examine everyday cultural items, allowing the viewer to reflect on our own everyday rituals, experiences and perceptions.

imakesoftfood.com

@imakesoftfood

artwork above queen bed

room 4

Above golden couch

Lucy Hersey
Morning by the River

Lucy Hersey creates earth paintings from her garden studio in Loch, South Gippsland. Lucy's works are instinctive, using home-grown and foraged plant and earth pigments This materiality creates an emotive connection to the destination and landscape in which they are made. Her work is a collaboration between artist and nature. Letting the earth pigments provide the initial direction, she then attempts to tap into the deep emotions, memories and connections to place. She examines movement in landscapes; warm, shallow water rippling across rocks, moving clouds, the way a wave drags the sand as it pulls back to the ocean.

Lucy has collaborated with A.R.C. Wines on their 2022 Summer releases available in the Rive Drive Hotel mini bar. Using grapes, wine, earth and vine leaves from A.R.C.’s Warragul vineyard, Lucy captured the serene and natural essence of the vineyard on the four distinct wine labels.

lucyhersey.com

@lucehersey

Leah Ann Early
Peach
Paper collage framed in Tasmanian oak
22.5 x 22.5cm

Leah Ann Early (LA Early) is a contemporary collage artist specialising in colour studies and relationships. Originally from Virginia, USA, she now shares her time at residences in Austinmer and Narooma, NSW. An original member of the Sydney Collage Society, Leah has a passion for collage in all forms, curating group shows and exhibiting in various galleries and museums in NSW and abroad. She uses both vintage and modern publications to source materials for her collages, renewing recycled print to create colour fields that modulate through shape and tone, texture and layering.

Leahannearly.com

@leahannearly

Beside bed:

Emmanuelle McGlade
Burnt Umber
Soft pastel on paper, framed
30x25cm

Emmanuelle McGlade is an artist based in Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Victoria, Australia.

Working with soft pastels, she creates drawings that explore the push and pull between order and disorder; balance and imbalance. Her work encapsulates a sense of stillness and clarity, influenced by observations and experiences in the natural environment. Emmanuelle graduated with a bachelor of fine arts (visual art), specialising in drawing and printmaking from the victorian college of the arts in 2016.

emmanuellemcglade.com

@emmanuellemcglade

artwork above queen bed

room 5

On mini bar

Artist Unknown
Title unknown [painting of daisies]
Oil on canvas board
45 x 35cm

Living room above couch

Linda Puna
Ngayuku Ngura – My Home, 2012

Silkscreen

Linda was born in Mimili. Her parents are Puna Yanima and Shannon Kantji. Linda began painting in 2006. Her style is minimal and depicts the country that surrounds Mimili. Linda is confined to a wheelchair and has limited movement to her arms and hands. She was the first Anangu person to be allowed back to the APY Lands in a motorised wheelchair to be with her family. She is highly engaged in community and APY Lands politics. With bold drawing and a joyous use of colour, Linda Puna depicts her community, Mimili and the surrounding homelands. Toyotas, windmills, rock-holes, maku (witchetty grubs) and bush footy are some of the motifs that recur in her works that combine contemporary life in community with Anangu Tjukurpa.

mimilimaku.com/lindapuna

@mimili_maku_arts

Outside bathroom

Emma Labattaglia
What you see doesn’t mean much to me, 2022
Oil pastels, oil paint, acrylic paint, collage on raw linen
30 x 30 cm

Emma is an abstract artist practicing from her studio in the coastal Victorian town, St Andrews Beach. She works intuitively, with music playing, which helps her get out of her head and tap into a deeper subconscious. Her work has a presence of childlike nostalgia and femininity. She uses colours, shapes and a range of layered materials; oil sticks, oil paint, oil pastels and soft pastels, to explore the idea of organic vs synthetic. Her works express a subjective presentation of her innermost feelings. You may find recognisable contours amongst the abstract forms hinting at the artist's intention.

@emma_labattaglia

In Bunk room

Shane Bonsujet
Fine Art, (n.d.)
Acrylic and marker on glass
80 x 68cm

Melbourne visual artist using mixed media to create works in neo expression, illustration and expressionism.

@shanebonsujet_art

Queen bedroom

Candy Nelson Nakamarra
Luritja, born 1964
Kalipinypa, (n.d.)
Silkscreen
60 x 42cm

Born in Yuendumu, at the edge of the Tanami Desert roughly 350kms from Alice Springs, Candy Nelson Nakamarra was first introduced to art making as a child by her father Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula(1925-2001), a renowned artist at the forefront of the Papunya art movement in the 1970s and 80s.

Candy learned to paint while being handed down family stories of Kalipinypa, the sacred Water Dreaming site north east of Kintore, and continues to be inspired by this cultural inheritance. An instinctive colourist, her primary consideration when approaching a new work is the selection of seven or eight colours that will make up the lacelike layers for which her paintings have become known, and she will often revisit her archive to analyse favourite combinations. Working on the ground, she begins each canvas with a coat of drips and washes in a handful of watered down colours. Once dry, she uses fine brushes to paint intricate designs in high contrasting colour, then adds a third layer of design in the original base colours.

Throughout this process Candy seeks feedback from her peers and mentors, discussing ideas and approaches as she pushes the canvas towards the moment it feels finished. Each painting transforms multiple times as she reinterprets her father’s stories, the tali (sandhills), rock formations, waterholes and running water of her country during storm season, and the water birds, bush foods, and plant life that erupt after rain has reinvigorated the landscape.

Tjupiarts.com.au

@tjupiarts

artwork above couch

We acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the beautiful land on which we work, love and play.
We pay our deepest respects to elders, past and present, from here and surrounding communities, looking after their land and families.