Meet Jo Bertini | Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jo Bertini and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jo, what inspires you?
My artworks emanate from many decades of research and field work into the unique and fragile beauty of the worlds’ most remote desert landscapes and the peoples and cultures that have flourished there. These are places that simultaneously invoke a sense of the vastness of space and a personal intimacy while retaining a fierce, unexpected wildness. Desert environments are the most seemingly harsh and inhospitable worlds yet have always inspired in us an elusive primary instinct to create. My paintings explore the extraordinary intrinsic value, interconnectedness and essential nature of these special places through a particularly female perspective, distinct from the established historical archive of desert understanding. My artworks become a type of elegy, a memorial, extending the traditions of landscape painting and oral storytelling. Trees can talk – mountains can move – rivers hold secrets – grains of sand weave myth, knowledge and cultures from past to the present.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I am a visual artist who lives and works between the ancient, arid lands of Australia and the high deserts of New Mexico, USA. I have been a professional, exhibiting artists for more than 35 years. My artworks incorporate landscape & portrait painting, science, ecology, history and cultural heritage, informed by working with indigenous custodians and communities living in these arid, isolated regions. For ten years I worked as the Expedition Artist with ‘Australian Desert Expeditions’, a group of experts from national universities, museums and scientific institutions on ecological, archeological and indigenous research into the most remote and inaccessible regions of the Australian deserts. I have exhibited and lectured for museums and galleries world wide and my work is represented in international, private, public, corporate, and museum collections.

After many decades of living and working in remote, desert places, my perspective, my artistic way of seeing, has been significantly informed and enhanced. Desert landscapes have become filtered through a vivid kaleidoscope of research, memory, knowledge and experience. My paintings become composites of times and places, unifying the transitory ephemera of the different seasons with a deep appreciation for the timelessness of desert landforms and archeology. The process of painting, the spontaneous dance and movement of the brush, acts for me as a conduit. Painting is a type of consciousness enhancer and focusing attention on the diversity of the natural world, inspires a mindful, artistic scrutiny.

I have been very fortunate that my interests and my artworks have connected to a very broad audience and I have been given the opportunity to live and work in such remote desert places and be so accepted and embraced by the traditional owners and indigenous people of these lands.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Camping out in the desert under the stars is an essential for me. Indigenous people of Australia have a saying ‘that when you sleep out in the desert under a full moon, that moon attaches a silver thread to you heart and will keep pulling you back’. They also say that ‘the desert right sizes you’. Being alone in the desert allows you to lose your ‘self’. Living and walking in places of wilderness, a-tuning oneself to the rhythms of the natural world, listening to the sounds and watching the birds and animals , paying attention to the plants and ecology becomes a natural and peaceful way of understanding ones place in the world and the intrinsic interconnectedness of all things. I love the high desert lands of Northern New Mexico, particularly the wilderness parks around Abiquiu.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
My life partner, musician and film maker Thomas Studer

Website: jobertini.com

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Image Credits
Thomas Studer. Prue Ruscoe.