Jenny Sages — Catherine Hunter Productions

Jenny Sages, Images after the Fact 2005 © Jenny Sages

Jenny Sages | Paths to Portraiture

“Art is everything to me. Art can shield me. Art can absorb me.” Jenny Sages

Jenny Sages in studio.

Born in Shanghai of Russian parentage, Jenny Sages came to Australia in 1948. A painter of extraordinary vitality and originality, her work is characterised by complex technique and a profound depth of feeling. After working professionally for thirty years as an illustrator, she devoted herself fully to painting in 1983 after a life-changing journey to the Kimberley in Australia's northwest.

Out of that journey, came a deep friendship with the indigenous artist Gloria Petyarre, among others, and a powerful connection to the Australian landscape that she continues to explore and that informs all her work.

Jenny Sages, Road to Utopia 2005 © Jenny Sages

“It was an epiphany. There are no two ways around it. It is was as if someone had poured something down my throat and I certainly began to feel that this is me, this is what I have to live. From then on, I tried to get that feeling back again and the only way I could was by working.” Jenny Sages

Sages won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting in 2005 and the Portia Geach Memorial Award for Portraiture twice. Her work was celebrated with a survey exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2010. In 2012, her self-portrait painted after the death of her husband was both runner-up in the Archibald Prize and winner of the People's Choice Award. It was the twentieth time she had been selected for the Archibald. Jenny Sages: Paths to Portraiture seeks to understand the forces that have shaped her work and the process by which she extends her vision.

Writer & Director/Catherine Hunter, Cinematographer/Bruce Inglis, Editor/Paolo Febbo. Jenny Sages: Paths to Portraiture was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery and first screened on the ABC in 2012. ©2012 Catherine Hunter Productions and Bruce Inglis.