Alice Pulvers

Alice Pulvers was born in Tokyo, Japan and grew up in both Tokyo and Kyoto with her two younger sisters, also artists, and her older brother. She was educated in Japanese schools until she moved to Sydney in 2000 and is bilingual and bicultural in Japanese and English. Alice began drawing and painting from an early age. When Alice was 15, she travelled to Paris, and the art she saw there made a strong and lasting impression on her. This experience and her other travels have influenced her development as an artist. Alice has studied life-drawing and has taken courses at the Julian Ashton Art School and at College of Fine Art in Sydney.

Alice exhibits her paintings regularly and has been a finalist in numerous art prizes including the Portia Geach Art Prize, the Mosman Art Prize, the Kilgour Prize, the Ravenswood Art Prize and the National Capital Art Prize.  Alice has been a semi-finalist six times in the national Doug Moran Portraiture and in the prestigious BP Portraiture Prize in London.

Alice has also had the opportunity to spend some time Paris, as well as travelling in Germany, the UK, China and Singapore. The art Alice saw on her travels has melded into her painting imagination, which is filled with images of air, water, animal and plant life. She recreates the strange relationships between the way we as humans experience our world and the forces of the universe acting upon our sense of reality. In Alice’s work, elements of naturalism, such as birds, fish, cattle and cats, appear in two-dimensional schematic landscapes. These are reminiscent of the way Japanese art flattens and arranges landscapes. Water birds appear frequently in her paintings. Alice has a fascination with these special birds, which can swim under the water, float on the water, walk on the land and fly in the air. In this way they transcend the forces of nature that confine many other living things, including ourselves.

Exhibition Catalogue