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Jamie Preisz
If I had to wait for inspiration to strike, I might only produce one piece of work a year he laughs whilst showing us around his inner city Sydney studio. Jamies’ ritual is to put his ‘paint paints’ on and come into the studio every day- for me its essential to show up everyday.
Seeing him hit his studio punching bag definately conjors up the image of an artists grinding out pieces of beauty. This dedication and passion is evident in his work, the detail and scale of the pieces immeditely stand out when you are up close in their presence
Jamie moved to Beijing as a toddler before returning to the Northern Beaches in Sydney a few years later. Throughout his childhood traveling was a constant theme and to help him pass the time his parents would give him a pen and paper to keep him entertained. This, he muses is probably where his love of drawing and painting was born.
After working as an illustrator in his 20’s, Jamie decided something needed to change. He spent a year saving money and then moved to France where he devoted an entire year to his artistry. This climaxed in holding an exhibition which is a huge achievement in itself to do in a foreign country after only being there for less than 12 months. IN his own words the exhibition wasnt that ‘successful’ however Jamie returned to Australia with a different world view and the air of an artist. Then thankfully, back in Sydney he won a prize that afforded him the money to create a new body of work & he hasn’t stopped painting since.
Photography is Jamie’s other passion. He learned to shoot in school on a Pentax K1000 film camera and it’s still his camera of choice. “Initially I wanted to study photography at university, but then the film lab closed down, so I switched to painting at the last minute because I wanted to make things in real life’. Jamie likes to incorporates a lot of his own experiences into his paintings. One of the quirkier ones is Lucky cats which show up a lot, because when he was a toddler in China the first memory he had was walking into a shop and seeing them in a window.
“I like them because they are so cheapo, but they are so beautiful, and they mean so much and yet they are so mass produced at the same time.”
