Graham Lupp is a visual artist who was born in Bathurst, New South Wales. In 1969 he graduated in architecture from the University of NSW in Sydney. From 1972 to 1977 he lived in London, completing a degree in fine art at Hornsey College of Art and post graduate studies at Chelsea School of Art.
After five years of lecturing in the arts, at what is now Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Lupp went painting full-time in 1984. In the course of his career he has had 50 solo exhibitions and has been included in nearly 30 group shows. His work is in public and private collections in Australia and overseas.
Although the scope of Lupp’s art reflects an interest in a wide range of subjects, his early training in architecture is a pervading influence - not only in his depiction of buildings, but in the carefully structured compositions that typify his work.
Lupp employs most media, moving freely between oils, gouache, watercolours and pastels. When drawing he prefers compressed charcoal or coloured pencils. When travelling he sketches in pen and ink and watercolour. Because of his diverse interests his work falls into distinct categories which he revisits as his inclinations dictate.
PHILOSOPHY
Regarding the various aspects of his work Lupp says, ‘My series called the Meldings, for example, was triggered by a great deal of travelling in the 1990s. I was reminded of the differences between our European culture and that of Islam, with its wonders of art, architecture and mathematics and how both of these differ from the unfathomable mysteries of the Indian subcontinent. As a painter I am continually drawn to the world’s art to experience its power. To marvel at the absolute perfection of the Taj Mahal for example, or to feel the resolute, stoic confidence in Rembrandt’s portrait in Kenwood House, or to experience again the eerie, eternal stillness of Michelangelo’s Medici Tombs in Florence.
Such things drive us to travel - and were the forces at work as I sorted through those spontaneous and often whimsical recollections of other places. Drawing also from the landscape of childhood and a youth spent camping and fishing with my father and uncle, I found myself fusing various memories into a series of paintings, the Meldings, that would preoccupy me for almost a decade.
FAMILY
Perhaps these musings and a love of travel grew out of my somewhat exotic family tree. The name Lupp was originally Lup, a Chinese first name. In approximately 1865 the family, initially from Canton, arrived in Australia from Tai Ho Chung, a village in the New Territories near Hong Kong. My father’s mother, Leonora Vistarini, was descended from an Italian family prominent in the city of Milan. Her father, a surveyor, was murdered by bushrangers in Queensland, her mother and sister died in childbirth and a few years later, on 10th June 1915, her young brother, Hector, was killed at Gallipoli. On my mother's side my origins are equally mixed being English, Welsh, Scots and Irish. My maternal grandmother, Jesse Rosetta Douglas, was a descendant of Charles Peet and Hannah Mullens, convicts from London, who arrived on the Scarboroughs and Lady Penryhn respectively, with the First Fleet in 1788'.
It is no surprise therefore, that an interest in history has shaped Lupp’s development and is a driving influence in his work on vernacular architecture in the region of NSW where he lives. The Vernacular series is an attempt to capture, or at least document, slowly disappearing examples of colonial rural building - in particular, unique timber and corrugated iron shearing sheds, haysheds and other outbuildings. Such imagery is an intrinsic part of Lupp’s psyche, although he finds the often unfamiliar vernacular of other countries just as potent a source of inspiration.
The symbolism of the world’s architecture has therefore gradually emerged as a dominant theme in Lupp’s career. In particular, attention is devoted to those examples which, through the skill of their creators, best express human spirituality. He considers religious architecture, from all parts of the globe, to be perhaps the pinnacle of human creativity.
