The Huon Valley is blessed with an array of artists, writers and intellectuals of all types.
Adding to the talent pool are the people who do wonderous things with food production and even growing speciality crops such as saffron.
But we will leave those artisans for another day to tell their unique and wonderous stories.
This brief article will introduce a local, well almost, he grew up in Margate and now lives in Cygnet.
Dr Nicky Osborn has recently completed his artist-in-residence tenure at Cygnet’s celebrated Balfour House.
Dr Osborn joins a long and talented list of artists who have occupied space at the Mary Street studio where they work their craft in public to show their talents to all and sundry and, hopefully make a sale or two.
Dr Osborn gained his doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) after his education at Margate Primary School, then Kingston High School on to Hobart College, Mt Nelson and finally university.
While the life of an academic seemed certain for Dr Osborn, now 29, it was his love of art and drawing that won out.
“I loved drawing and art since I was young and now, I’m making a career out of it,” he said.
“It can be tedious, and it is hard work but I love it.”
His preferred style of art is something out of the ordinary, but the finished works are nothing short of spectacular and remarkable.
He is an artist using the tenebrism style with the grisaille method to emphasise the black and white tones of the final work.
Tenebrism is derived from the Latin tenebrae, “darkness.”
In tenebrist paintings, the figures are often portrayed against a background of intense darkness, but the figures themselves are illuminated by a bright, searching light that sets off their three-dimensional forms.
The technique was introduced by the Italian painter Caravaggio (1571-1610) and was taken up in the early 17th century by painters influenced by him, including the French painter Georges de La Tour, the Dutch painters Gerrit van Honthorst and Hendrik Terbrugghen, and the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán
That technique is used with grisaille which is the simplest form, done with just black and white.
The final work is a painstaking process that starts with Dr Osborn taking hundreds of images of the subject with a digital camera, picking out the best from which he literally copies by hand onto a black board in small sections.
The final process is to fill in the vacant space with a white waxed pencil.
The results are stunning.
