When you think of art cooperatives or communes, the visions that often spring to mind are of very obsessed and stressed young things in matted hair and paint-spattered dungarees, living and working in derelict buildings and half-starved from lack of funds.
But when you see Orange’s Colour City Creatives, a partnership of two of the region’s best professional artists, Aida Pottinger and Joy Engelman, you can appreciate that cooperative artistry can be a lot more than simple dedication and self-denial – it’s a very fine balance of passion, creativity, critical support and making a living.
And it’s far from a leaking loft or abandoned factory that the two artists have acquired for their creative coop.
In a stroke of pure genius, Aida Pottinger has leased the old railway barracks – a solid, fine-looking red-brick mansion of a place that’s been sitting neglected and forgotten for years between the railway tracks at the sweeping railway crossing on southern Peisley Street.
With a crisp white interior decor, loads of windows, polished banisters and rooms all over the place, the two-story building now has a second life as Colour City Creatives’ studios.
Joy Engelman (left) and Aida Pottinger -- passion and genius
It’s here where Aida and Joy, along with other noted local artists, will work in close association, though in individual studios, free from the petty interferences of life, inspiring each other and taking opportunity of something that just doesn’t happen enough for local painters – marketing and selling their works.
Colour City Creatives are staging their celebratory first public exhibition in what is now the Barracks Gallery, with champagne and live music, on Friday January 27 at 6pm.
It’s only a one-night event, and there’s a reason for that – the “Creatives” want the place to be a quiet, inspirational refuge for its members and so, instead of regular crowd-pulling exhibitions, art enthusiasts and buyers will have to make private appointments to view the various works.
For any artist, it’s an exciting concept and, as Aida Pottinger and Joy Engelman made clear in this full video interview with ONN, it’ll make up in some ways for the chronic lack of a commercial art gallery in Orange.
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