Earth to Sky - The Art of Victor Majzner

Book excerpt: Victor Majzner arrived in Australia in 1959 as a Jewish refugee from Russia. His career as a painter accelerated during the 1980s when, as a migrant seeking identity, he began to travel inland and study the antiquity of the ancient continent as well as forming close bonds with several important Aboriginal artists from the Warmun Community in the Northern Territory. His spectacular and unconventional paintings deal with issues of identity and, over recent years, with his developing sense of his Jewish heritage. Some paintings, more surreal than his Australian landscapes, emerged from his late 1990s travels to the Negev Desert in Israel. A feature to this book is its inclusion of pen and ink studies made as preliminaries to the major paintings.Leigh Astbury teaches art history at Monash University, Melbourne.This book also comes as a special edition with original etching by Victor Majzner and a slip-case.