After lifetime of designing and building houses on Lower North Shore and teaching architecture at Sydney University and combining it with years of drawing, dancing, painting and running Time for Drawing workshops in Australia and internationally Rena ventured into Australian desert where in 2016 she joined Idris Murphy Art Workshop in Fowlers Gap. You should come back here with your students he suggested. Forever grateful she has been returning there every year to run Desert Calling Art Camps sharing with others her growing love of this country. Recently retired from full time work in architecture business Rena devotes all her time to art, writing and continuing to connect and explore Australian Outback. Spending time alone or with a few painting devotees and students she travels to Fowlers Gap every April (since 2016) to keep exploring the quartz ridges and painting in the dry riverbeds where changing colors, moving shadows and the sound of birdsong and wind grow into vibrating with life symphony, healing the senses and nourishing the heart.
The Australian desert confronts us all with its silent presence. Yet it also draws us in. The huge open space and landmasses create a deep resonance; the sound of silence there is loud. Yet most of us don’t hear it with our heads filled with stresses and daily chatter which we bring with us to the desert. It takes days or weeks for chatter to quiet down, even more days or weeks to start seeing colors. Spending time in the desert changes us. As we let go of stories and chatter in our heads, we notice silence and start listening gradually entering into a silent conversation with the vast horizons and intimate spaces. Questions arise and answers emerge as we listen. Desert becomes our teacher.
Rena Czaplinska-Archer PhD, visual and somatic artist, former Sydney University Architecture Faculty lecturer, passionate ecological and heritage architect and former Tin Sheds drawing tutor, lifelong student of Anna Halprin Art/Life process, and a founder of Time for Drawing workshops. These programs have been offered in Australia and internationally since 2007 aiming to help participants to shift from habitual ways of moving and thinking and to explore the Art of Seeing through Drawing/Painting inspiring creativity and new ways of thinking. Rena has a particular interest in practice of authentic movement and drawing as an inquiry into the nature of experience. Her recent second solo painting exhibition was based on years of painting in the Outback “Desert Journeys- Desert Calling” https://www.willoughby.nsw.gov.au/Events/Desert-Journeys-%E2%80%93-Desert-Calling
For reviews and info on former Time for Drawing workshops go to https://rena-architects.com.au/timefordrawing