Heath Wae is a multidisciplinary artist currently living and
working in Melbourne. After graduating from Sydney College of the
Arts in 2011, his inspiration drove him to India where he spent two
years learning painting techniques and colour studies from a culture
rich in its visual and philosophical arts. Following India his travels
and explorations of visual culture took him across the East where he
became deeply interested in the art of scroll painting and the Zen
attitudes undertaken to create them, eventually moving to New York
where he lived and exhibited for over a year.
Heavily influenced by the art of The Southern School (China/Japan)
and Bonsai which Newman learned from his father; he draws from
the idea of Literati: the scrawl of the drunken monk. Literati is a
culture of art formed in China and then Japan notably concerned
with ink painting, splashes, calligraphic scrawls and minimalistic
plant styling (bonsai.) Drawing from this Newman’s work incorporates
elements of hesitancy and fragility into the confident physical
gestures of abstract expressionism. Combining fragments of still life,
myths of the world, strokes, scrawls and colour fields Heath
describes his work as a mental map; both of his subconscious and of
the greater, deeper collective consciousness. These ideas and the
exploration of colour in Heath’s work continues to drive his
exploration of texture, tone, perception and depth.