Petr HEREL   b. 1943

At fourteen Petr won a place at the School of Fine Arts, the Czech specialist high school in Prague where only twenty two pupils were accepted each year. Additional to the usual subjects, he studied drawing, lithography, etching, painting, sculpture, typography, lettering and bookbinding. In 1964 he was successful to gain a place at the studio for graphic and book art at the Prague Academy of Applied Arts. His student work was highly regarded and he was awarded a scholarship to study printmaking at the Atelier Nourrison, France.

Settling in Australia in 1973 after marrying designer Dorothy Davis, his lecture posts over the following 20 years included the Caulfield Institute of Technology in Melbourne, l’École Nationale des Beaux Arts de Dijon, and as the Head of the Graphic Investigation Workshop at the Canberra Institute for the Arts.

Text is merely a starting point for Herel’s artist’s books, the beginning of his own visual journey. Stones, wood and material from the earth are of interest to him and his imagery repeatedly refers to tombstones and skulls and often fuses ‘old lands with the new’ by superimposing lived environments over ancient icons such as the tombstone like references to the old-testament.

In recent years Herel has made a number of drawings, often working on black paper or on paper that he has pre-prepared with a mezzotint surface which he considers is like drawing on emery paper. The sensation is physical and tactile, something like drawing on a lithographic stone. The small print Silent Commandments 2002, was the result of a artist-in-residence.

Talus is an artist book with three original etchings and aquatints. As with all his work, the drawings are never intended to be illustrative and the text, in French, has been selected with the poet as a conjunction to his drawings.

This book fits well with a small but important focus on artist books and folios in The Holmes à Court Collection. Artists represented are Eugene von Guerard, Conrad Martens, Morgan’s early sketchbook of Western Australia, Donald Friend’s Art in an Artless Society and Nola Farman’s The book of dark pages by Nora Fleming.

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