The Workshop is staffed by practising professional artists who have national and international reputations, and who actively maintain contact with other institutions, arts organisations and practitioners. Staff have a broad range of technical expertise and research interests, encompassing traditional approaches to painting as well as digital image-making and installation-based practice. The Art Theory Workshop, Art Forum public lecture program, SofA Gallery, Foyer Gallery and Photospace provide additional stimulus from a wide range of visiting artists, crafts people and theorists

Ruth Waller (Head of Workshop)
Ruth Waller is a painter whose recent work has developed out of her interest in the picture spaces of pre-Renaissance narrative painting. In stripping these spaces of their narrative action, her pictures develop a dialogue with modernism, but they also are intended to allude to the struggle to find a meaningful space for painting in contemporary culture. She is represented by Watters Gallery in Sydney. In 2000 she was awarded an ACT Arts Fellowship and spent three months as Artist-in-Residence at the Australia Council Barcelona studio

Peter Maloney
I have been exhibiting paintings and drawings primarily in Sydney since 1989, being the lucky first artist shown at the Legge Gallery which opened in that year. My work has always been informed by gestural abstraction. Lately that formal underpinning is less obvious with the addition of text and "spirograph" scrawl applied using painstaking template and tracing techniques. I introduced hand painted photographic works to my practice 5 years ago in order to explore some personal/social obsessions: music, sex and (sadly) the impact of the AIDS pandemic. My paintings have been exhibited widely and are represented in corporate, private, and museum collections.

During the 80s I worked as a stills photographer for a Berlin underground film maker and also at that time was a 'bar useful' at a nude bar in Corsica. In 1996 I occupied a studio at the Cite des Arts in Paris. I had a solo show at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1997 and had the pleasure of exhibiting a large show at Canberra Contemporary Art Space in 1999. Recently the photographic works were exhibited in Rome and New York City.

I was invited to the school as Artist-in-residence in the Painting Workshop in 1998 and, since then, have been teaching here, having found no reason to leave. SofA is the hub of the art community in the region and being here has allowed me to seriously focus on my own work, which I must say has benefited by the constant interaction/interruption with students and their own work

Vivienne Binns
The work of Vivienne Binns explores what it means to be an artist in Australia with local and European histories, engaging with cultures in the Asia Pacific region. Her abiding interests are the function of art making as a human activity, which occurs in all social groups, and the manifestations of this through out social environments especially in patterning and surface treatments.

Vivienne has spent time in Tokyo, New Guinea, the Cook Islands and Samoa. The patterned Tapa cloths from the region are a continuing source of inspiration to her. In 2000 she was in London researching Captain Cook’s voyages to the Pacific.

Her recent work, In Memory of the Unknown Artist encompasses material from her interest in Australian communities, Pacific and Asian cultures and industrially produced surfaces. Vivienne trained at the National Art School Sydney. For contribution to art, craft and community she has received the Order of Australia Medal, the Ros Bower Memorial Award and the Australian Artists Creative Fellowship. She exhibits with Bellas Gallery Brisbane, Sutton Gallery Melbourne and Helen Maxwell Gallery Canberra. Her work is held in major museums and collections throughout Australia.

Her first exhibition in the 1960s, held at Watters Gallery in Sydney, contained powerful sexual symbolism which was unexpected from a young woman, and is now seen as anticipating 1970s feminist art. In the 70s she was active in the crafts and fought for improvements for women artists and conditions in the arts generally. From 1972 she evolved an art practice in communities throughout Australia, often working from a caravan in rural NSW. The best known projects from this period are Mothers’ Memories Others’ Memories (1979-1981) and Full Flight when Vivienne worked from a caravan in rural areas of NSW. During the last ten years her practice has focused on studio-based painting.

Deborah Singleton
Deborah Singleton has taught at the ANU School of Art since 1990. Prior to this she taught at the Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education, Sydney College of the Arts and the University of Sydney Arts Workshop.

She has qualifications in Fine Arts from the University of Sydney as well as a degree and a postgraduate diploma in Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts.

Deborah has exhibited in solo and group shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. Most recently she exhibited a series of computer manipulated images at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space. Her current work involves the combination of painting and computer manipulated images.

Robert Boynes (Adjunct Associate Professor)
Robert Boynes graduated from the South Australian School of Art in 1962, and has also completed post-graduate studies in printmaking and film. These interests have continued to provide a strong research base for his work, and inform much of the dialogue between his painting and new media.

Boynes has had 50 solo exhibitions in Australia, UK and the USA. He has been included in numerous important international projects, surveys and art fairs. His works are in the collections of all state galleries in the country and part of many corporate holdings throughout the world. Boynes' paintings have always reflected his observation of the built environment, the social conditions and the political debate that follows. Since the mid 70s Boynes has combined large format silk-screened and painted images. In 1992 he began incorporating computer manipulated images extending these processes and their interface with painting.

Some of Robert Boynes' recent achievements include commissions in public spaces for the ACT Legislative Assembly and the Federal Court in Canberra. He was an Artist-in-Residence at Artspace in Sydney for three months in 1998-99, and in 2000 at the Arthur Boyd Foundation-Bundanon Trust Riversdale studio. His work was part of Project 2-2000, Sydney Biennale as was also part of the Olympic cultural program at Access Contemporary Art Gallery in Sydney.

Noel Ford (casual lecturer)
Many years ago, an old man packed into a small case the few things that he would need for his day's journey. He lived in a small modest room, in a very large apartment block, containing similar rooms. The apartment block was in a large, ugly, bleak, grey city.

The old man travelled by foot to the bus stop. The bus took him to a railway station – the train took him far from his home. At the end of the rail journey he caught a second bus and travelled further, after which he walked some distance, finally reaching his destination.

The old man was standing on the shores of a very large bay where enormous craggy weathered mountain tops thrust themselves up out of the water, their tops covered in twisted and gnarled vegetation. The scene was misty, flocks of birds darted about, the sunlight was diffused and gentle. Standing quite still on the shore, he took his fill from this, his special place. Having replenished himself, he returned home.

Finally arriving home, he proceeded to paint, with great gusto, his day’s experience. Asked why he took neither drawing materials nor camera to record his experience, he replied "Oh no, I have something much better than any of these things". He continued, "I absorb the essence of what I see".

My journey commenced on the 10th November 1946 in Coonamble N.S.W... my journey continues as I live and work in Canberra

Peter Jordan (casual lecturer)
I see the subject of a work as the concrete idea on which a painting can be ‘hung’. When finished, I might find that the subject is no longer recognisable and may be called abstracted. This thing, the subject, is a tiny part of a painting, like content. Poussin used mythological subjects as a starting point, subject matter which you can take or leave, but from which he made some great paintings.

To have something to say may means that you wish to illustrate a point. I have no interest in using painting as a didactic tool. Some people think you should have something to say, but to me a painting is always silent.

Often my paintings are based on a feeling, and then they may turn into a person or a landscape or a jug or something else. Objects are used as part of the formal consideration of a work. Good art can be summed up in the line by Helmut Ferderle who wrote "I sense it as something that stays with me as a quality."