New beginnings, New Work

GROWING up in Greendale, Tonya Blizzard experienced a joyful and creative childhood immersed in art, music, and the bush.

Her mother and father, a painter and a sculptor, were so creative that they built their own family home out of second-hand materials.

“It was a very interesting time. As I child, I didn’t think I would end up doing art, but it must have been in me,” she said.

Blizzard studied art at the University of Ballarat and the Victorian College of the Arts in the 80s and 90s, played in bands in Melbourne, and then went onto have children.

Now a single parent, she’s settled in Ballarat and enjoying time in her studio, developing “raw, abstract, scrawly” acrylic and charcoal works that often feature text.

Many of these most recent works are currently exhibited at the Old Butcher’s Shop Gallery in Soldiers Hill until the end of the month.

“My show is titled New Work, but it’s also about my new life, new beginnings, and personal heartbreak. There’s a lot of human emotion… that viewers can interpret themselves.

“Being a single mum of three kids and a woman artist is not easy, and finding the time to paint is sometimes difficult,” Blizzard said.

“I’ve had a few late nights in the studio, but I don’t know what I’d do without art. It’s like a release.”

Blizzard has exhibited works in Japan, Korea, Russia, and at Paris’s International Contemporary Art Fair.

Her father, the late Peter Blizzard, was a celebrated Australian sculptor and lecturer at Federation University, who designed the Australian Prisoner of War Memorial at Lake Wendouree, and the brick sculpture beside the Gold Museum.

Her mother, Liz Blizzard, is a mixed media visual artist who continues to practice.

New Work runs until Saturday, 30 April at 112 Seymour Street, Soldiers Hill.