Sydney (Paddington)

Thursday 6 March 2025
ART OF THE INFINITE SKY
Presented by Sam Bowker
Time & Venue: 12:30pm and 6:00pm. Paddington Uniting Church, 395 Oxford Street, Paddington

Artists, architects and cartographers have worked with scientists to describe and predict the movements of celestial objects. Through their pursuit of knowledge they created extraordinary artworks. This lecture will survey some of the most remarkable astronomical artefacts from the early modern period, including Indigenous Australian, Indian, Islamic and Renaissance astrological charts, astrolabes, armillary spheres and orreries, as exquisite relics from the history of art and science.

Associate Professor Sam Bowker specializes in Art History and Visual Culture at Charles Sturt University, where he is also the Sub Dean of Graduate Research. Beyond developing Australia’s leading Islamic art and design subject for university students, he is a shadow puppeteer, a curator of diverse exhibitions, and has published widely on the history of Egyptian tentmaker applique. He also lectures for ‘The Art of Everywhere Else’ – a global art history survey, shared online with ArtsNational in 2024. 

Thursday 3 April 2025
BABYLON: ART AND LEGEND
Presented by Sue Rollin
Time & Venue: 12:30pm and 6:00pm. Paddington Uniting Church, 395 Oxford Street, Paddington

Babylon: the very name is evocative. Once one of the greatest cities in the ancient world, a vanished metropolis which lay deserted for over 2000 years, its history is bound up with myth and legend but it has never been forgotten. Biblical accounts of the Tower of Babel, Daniel in the Lions’ Den, Belshazzar’s Feast, the Fall of Babylon, the Whore of Babylon, and classical references to the great walls and Hanging Gardens have inspired artists throughout the centuries. This lecture also looks at the real Babylon, beside the River Euphrates, as explored and excavated since the 19C.

Sue Rollin lives in London and holds degrees in Near Eastern archaeology, South Asian studies and conference interpreting. She has tutored and lectured at London and Cambridge Universities, been a staff interpreter at the European Commission, and currently works as a freelance interpreter, lecturer and tour guide. Sue has travelled widely for work and pleasure and has led cultural tours in Spain, Sicily, Morocco, the Middle East, Central Asia and India. She has co-authored travel guides on Jordan and on Istanbul. In the UK, Sue lectures for the Arts Society and the V&A and she has done four previous ArtsNational lecture tours.

Thursday 1 May 2025
WORKING FROM LIFE: PUPPETS, LAY FIGURES AND STRANGE STUDIOS
Presented by Bill Platz
Time & Venue: 12:30pm and 6:00pm. Paddington Uniting Church, 395 Oxford Street, Paddington

Until quite recently, it was commonplace for artists to populate their working spaces with odd studio puppets called ‘lay figures’. These disconcerting figures were beautiful pieces of ingenuity and craftsmanship and they enabled artists to pose and study the body when bodies were otherwise unavailable or inconvenient. Lay figures allowed artists to work ‘from life’ without the living. In this lecture, Dr William Platz will use his artwork and his research into studio puppets to shine light into this obscure corner of art practice and to demonstrate the continuing relevance of studio puppets in contemporary art.

Dr William Platz is an American-Australian artist, teacher and researcher with a disciplinary focus on Drawing who exhibits and publishes regularly in the US, Europe and Australia. With research concentrations in life drawing, portraiture and pedagogies of drawing, his recent work confects drawing, the body and puppets. Dr Platz resides in Brisbane and is currently Head of Drawing at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Dr Platz completed his BFA and MA degrees in New York and his PhD in Australia.

Thursday 29 May 2025
THE SCOTTISH COLOURISTS
Presented by Alice Foster
Time & Venue: 12:30pm and 6:00pm. Paddington Uniting Church, 395 Oxford Street, Paddington

In the early twentieth century Samuel Peploe, J.D. Fergusson, F.C.B. Cadell and G. Leslie Hunter were never a cohesive movement but were united by their love of colour and light – and of Scotland and France. Trained professionally in Edinburgh, they rejected the dour atmosphere of that city for places such as the magical island of Iona on the west coast of Scotland; Paris, and the south of France. Their subjects were new and exciting, their brushwork freer than previously known in Edinburgh. Today they are applauded for fusing elements of Scottish heritage with aspects of the Parisian avant-garde.

Alice has lectured for Oxford University Department of Continuing Education since 1998. She lectures regularly at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and at the Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock. Her busy freelance career includes organising History of Art study days with colleagues, and regular weekly classes in Oxfordshire and Worcestershire. In 2004 Alice joined The Arts Society and has lectured in Britain and in Europe. 

SPECIAL INTEREST DAY

Friday 30 May 2025
MASTERS OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
Presented by Alice Foster
Time & Venue: 9:45 – 3pm, Royal Sydney Golf Club, Kent Road, Rose Bay

Italian Renaissance gave us some of the best known and most loved artists in history: Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Veronese, Titian, Bellini, Tintoretto. 15th Century Florence was the cradle of the Renaissance, where artistic expression reflected a vibrant new age of scholarship. Botticelli and Fra Angelico pioneered the new interest in anatomy coupled with decoration. In Venice, painters were informed by colours, changing light, and texture. Leonardo da Vinci epitomised Renaissance Humanism and created some of the most influential paintings in western art.

Cost per day includes morning tea/coffee & lunch:
Members: $165 per person
Guests: $185 per person

Thursday 26 June 2025
JANE AUSTEN – 250 GLORIOUS YEARS
Presented by Susannah Fullerton
Time & Venue: 12:30pm and 6:00pm. Paddington Uniting Church, 395 Oxford Street, Paddington

Susannah Fullerton, President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia and author of several books about Jane Austen, shares her passion for Austen’s novels and her interest in her life. Illustrations bring the Regency world to life and readings will remind audiences just how funny Jane Austen can be. The 6 most polished, controlled and elegant social comedies to be found in English Literature were written by a woman whose personal life was unexciting and confined. Jane Austen’s cool judgment, ironic detachment and her genius gave her novels depth and charm and made them some of the most popular novels ever!

Susannah has a BA from the University of Auckland NZ and a post-graduate degree in Victorian literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She teaches literature and lectures regularly at the State Library of NSW and the Art Gallery of NSW. In 2017 Susannah was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for Services to Literature and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW.

Thursday 31 July 2025
A CARPET RIDE TO KHIVA
Presented by Chris Aslan
Time & Venue: 12:30pm and 6:00pm. Paddington Uniting Church, 395 Oxford Street, Paddington

Chris Aslan tells his own story of working with UNESCO to establish a silk carpet workshop in the desert oasis of Khiva, Uzbekistan – the most homogenous example of Islamic architecture in the world. His work took him to the bazaars of Afghanistan to purchase natural dyes, and to the great libraries and museums of Europe to track down 15th century manuscripts to revive carpet designs from their illuminations. He also saw the lives of women transformed and became the largest private employer in town.

Chris spent his childhood in Turkey and in war-torn Beirut and is currently based in Cambridge. His career extended from the sea, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Oxford. He established a UNESCO workshop reviving fifteenth century carpet designs and embroideries which became the largest nongovernment employer in town. He was kicked out as part of an anti-Western purge and recorded his experiences in “A Carpet Ride to Khiva”. The lecture traces his time in Khiva and the book that followed.

Thursday 28 August 2025
CREMONA AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF VIOLIN MAKING
Presented by Toby Faber
Time & Venue: 12:30pm and 6:00pm. Paddington Uniting Church, 395 Oxford Street, Paddington

For about 200 years until the mid- 18th century, workshops in the small northern Italian town of Cremona produced violins and other string instruments which remain the most desirable in the world. This lecture traces the story of that golden age, beginning with Andrea Amati in the 1560s then through the generations to the death of Antonio Stradivari in 1737. It considers why techniques have been lost and whether they can ever be recovered. And it introduces some of Cremona’s celebrated customers: not just famous violinists, but also Galileo Galilei and royal
patrons like Catherine de Medici, Queen of France.

An experienced lecturer, Toby Faber began his career with Natural Sciences at Cambridge, followed by investment banking, management consulting and five years as managing director of the publishing company founded by his grandfather, Faber and Faber, where he remains on the board. He is also non-executive Chairman of its sister company, Faber Music and a director of Liverpool University Press.

Thursday 25 September 2025
PAINTING IN THE MODERN GARDEN
Presented by Lydia Bauman
Time & Venue: 12:30pm and 6:00pm. Paddington Uniting Church, 395 Oxford Street, Paddington

Monet, perhaps the most important painter of gardens, once said he owed his painting “to flowers”. But so many other artists not only created gardens but made them the subject of their work – such as Pissarro, Sargent, Tissot, Kandinsky, Klee, Van Gogh, Klimt and Matisse.
The modern garden, transformed by 19th century innovations such as hybridisation, glasshouses and foreign exploration, was part of a great social change to which artists responded from the 1860s onwards. This talk traces the appearance of the garden as a modern phenomenon and the development of new art movements adopting it as their subject.

Lydia was born in Poland and studied for her BA in Fine Art at University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (John Christie Scholarship and the Hatton Award), and an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She has since divided her time between painting and exhibiting as well as lecturing widely to adult audiences. She has taught at London’s National Gallery for more than 35 years, and intermittently at London’s Tate Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, as well as collections such as Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Hermitage and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

SPECIAL INTEREST DAY

Friday 26 September 2025
LOOKING FOR GEORGIA: My travels across New Mexico in the Footsteps of Georgia O’Keeffe
Presented by Lydia Bauman
Time & Venue: 9:45 – 3pm, Royal Sydney Golf Club, Kent Road, Rose Bay

Legendary American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) lived in and painted the New Mexico desert over 5 decades, calling it “my backyard”. In September 2017, Lydia Bauman, herself a landscape painter, travelled in her footsteps to find the iconic landscape motifs O’Keeffe made her own. The art historian in her wanted to deepen her understanding of the famous artist, the artists in her wanted to challenge her own landscape painting practice. This is an account of her journey, her insights, her adventures, and her own resulting body of over 80 paintings inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe country, shown at a major solo exhibition in London’s Mall Galleries in 2019.

Cost per day includes morning tea/coffee & lunch:
Members: $165 per person
Guests: $185 per person

Thursday 6 November 2025
THE TRUE STORY BEHIND THE WORLD’S BIGGEST ART HEIST
Presented by Georgina Bexon 
AGM: 12:30pm
LECTURE: 1:10 pm & 6:00 pm
Venue: Paddington Uniting Church, 395 Oxford Street, Paddington

On 18 March 1990, the ‘impossible’ happened – thirteen works of art, valued at a total of $500 million, were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Museum officials, police and security experts were completely baffled as to how this had happened. These great masterpieces have never been recovered; a devastating loss to the museum and its public. This talk relates the story of the fascinating police investigation into the missing paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas and Manet; resulting in knowledge of how, why and by whom the robbery was committed but leaving the crime officially ‘unsolved’.

Georgina Bexon is an international art historian, a Consultant Art Historian at the Oriental Club in London and a tour guide at Tate Modern. Georgina holds an MA in Arts Management and Policy from City, University of London and an MA in Art History from SOAS, University of London. Georgina is a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Arts Scholars and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Asiatic Society.