Jo Bertini Fieldwork

Fieldwork is a visually engaging contemporary art book that brings to life artist Jo Bertini’s long and intimate involvement with the Australian desert. Her pen and ink drawings, works in pencil and charcoal, as well as hundreds of small gouaches are a vibrant visual diary of the changing landscape. This highly illustrated book will reinvigorate the way we see the desert by creating a fresh perspective on the existing visual narrative. Spirited and uncompromising, Bertini is one of a only a small number of non-indigenous Australian artists for whom the desert has become an essential subject. As a woman travelling to extreme and remote areas with a string of camels, her experiences are unique.

It is from the hundreds of sketchbooks that make up Bertini’s archive that a selection of images has been drawn and distilled into a single stunning volume. Her work reflects the desert in it many moods – harsh and forbidding or a wonderland of colour and life as it appears after the rains.

With an introduction by Robyn Davidson, author of the best-selling book Tracks, Fieldworkis an authentic engagement with the desert lands and Bertini as a painter and explorer.

'It is only possible to paint the desert with knowledge. You cannot just dip into the desert and hope to see it. Jo Bertini has been very fortunate in going into the desert repeatedly ... There is an energy in her brush that corresponds with the emotional response to this landscape.' - Andrew Sayers, director, National Portrait Gallery

About the Author

Jo Bertini is an award winning Australian artist and comes from a family rich in Australian artistic heritage. Bertini’s paintings have been curated in hundreds of group and touring exhibitions, both here and overseas. She has had over 25 years of solo exhibitions, has been widely published and reproduced and is represented in many private and public collections both nationally and internationally. She has been awarded several artist residencies and important commissions.

Bertini has spent the last ten years focused on the landscape, places and peoples of the remote desert regions of Australia.