Madison

 = =

** Deborah Halpern **
Deborah Halpern is a mosaic artist but she also does charcoal drawings, prints, and chromatics and gouache paintings. She was born in Melbourne in 1957; she is the daughter of artists Sylvia and Artec Halpern. She studied painting at the Caulfield institute of Technology in 1976. She now lives at her home and studio in Warrandyte. Most of her artworks are mosaic sculptures, like Angle the giant three legged, two headed angel that used to stand in the moat of the National Gallery of Victoria, but is now relocated at Birrarung Marr. Ophila, another one of Deborah’s large sculptures which stands in Southbank, Melbourne and was named the official face of Melbourne Tourism. Another of her sculptures is the called the ‘Power of Community’ which stands outside Beauty Park, South Frankston. All of Deborah’s art work can be seen at the Christine Abrahams Gallery, 27 Gipps Street, Richmond. Deborah usually starts her mosaic statues with plans and sketches, but some of her work isn’t planned. After the planning she creates the figure from steel mesh and is sprayed with expanding foam. She then carves the shape of her artwork and covers it with fibro-glass skin. Finally chromatic tiles are adhered to the surface of the final piece. She also does paintings, charcoal drawings, prints and smaller sculptures. Mermaid’ is a colourful print which sits in my family room and why I chose Deborah Halpern. Other prints are ‘Animal in Contemplation’, ‘Flathead’, ‘Snake’, ‘Mr Potato-head’ and ‘Rubber man’. Some of her smaller sculptures are ‘Coil pot’, ‘Coil pot 2’ and ‘House on Stilts’. Looking at the pictures that are being handed around you can tell that Deborah gets a lot of her inspiration from Pablo Picasso with her bold and interesting designs. You also notice that all of her artwork is decorated with large faces that give her work emotion and is her signature. In her work she uses colour and line a lot. She uses complementary colours in her pictures and in some of her sculptures and different shades and tones of the same colour to make her artwork stand out. Her curvy and fun lines make her work enjoyable and interesting to look at. Deborah believes her wacky designs that are made for no reason is a joyful expression of her life. She has a passion for everything that she creates whether it is a huge mosaic or a small print. For the future, she hopes to create inflatable artworks the size of buildings and send them on a trip around the world.