Edge Rewrite
everything Source code View original
// HTMLRewriter · presentation

This page was redesigned at the edge.

Cloudflare fetched the original article and streamed it through HTMLRewriter to apply an entirely new visual system without rebuilding the source page.

// request.cf · coarse context

A page that knows where it met you.

Only coarse request metadata is shown. This demo does not display or persist visitor IP addresses.

Country
US
Cloudflare location
CMH
Connection
HTTP/2
Language
Not provided

Ray ID: a4494b42bd11cf3f

Jump to content

Draft:Graeme Stevenson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • Comment: Good work so far on this article. However, unfortunately, in order to prove notability, an article needs to references 2-3 sources which are reliable, independent, secondary sources, which talk about the subject of the Wikipedia article at length. We have one very good source in the Daily telegraph article, but we need at least one more, and unfortunately the other sources are either not independents (obituaries are usually considered unreliable since they go out of their way not to say negative things about the deceased), or only mentions in passing. Oh, and one broken link. The Artists and Galleries of Australia might get this article over the line if you could let us know how much there is about him in there, and whether it’s an independent publications (good), or a form of PR subsidied by the artists (less good). Hopefully we can get strong enough sources sorted out to get this article over the line and accepted. Good luck 👍 Absurdum4242 (talk) 16:26, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Graeme Stevenson
OAM
Born(1958-06-29)29 June 1958
New South Wales, Australia
Died5 June 2022(2022-06-05) (aged 63)
Known forWildlife painting, illustration, television presenting
Notable workThe Atlas of Parrots of the World (1991)
Colour In Your Life
AwardsMedal of the Order of Australia (2017)

Graeme John Stevenson OAM (29 June 1958 – 5 June 2022) was an Australian wildlife artist and television presenter. He provided the drawings for the reference work The Atlas of Parrots of the World (1991),[1] and created and presented Colour In Your Life, a documentary series about artists that ran to more than 300 episodes.[2] In 2017 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the visual arts.[3]

Early life

[edit]

Stevenson was born at Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, in 1958.[4][5] He had no formal art training.[5] He was educated at Tweed River High School and held his first exhibition in 1984.[6] He later lived at Murwillumbah in northern New South Wales.[3]

Career

[edit]

Painting and illustration

[edit]

Stevenson worked in oils and acrylics and also as a watercolourist.[4][7] His subjects were chiefly wildlife, and particularly birds; works offered at auction include studies of cockatoos, parrots and rosellas alongside other animal subjects.[4]

In 1988 he was commissioned to illustrate The Atlas of Parrots of the World by the zoological author David Alderton. Published by TFH Publications in 1991, the 544-page volume is illustrated throughout with Stevenson's drawings,[1][8] and appeared in six languages.[6]

He was invited by the conservationist George Adamson to paint the lions in his care, and painted animal subjects in India and South Africa. His work has been featured in American art magazines.[6] Three of his paintings are held in the collection of the former United States president Bill Clinton.[9][8] In 2010 the Tweed Daily News described him as the only Australian artist to have appeared on an American television programme built around his own work and its sale, which it said reached an audience of 70 million a year.[9] In 2014 he was preparing to stage an exhibition in Los Angeles.[7]

In 2009 Stevenson painted a five-metre by two-metre canvas titled The Golden Mean, the largest work he had attempted, narrating the golden ratio as it recurs in nature. He began it at home and continued painting in public at the Escape Art Gallery in Murwillumbah, where it was shown from 29 November 2009 in a group exhibition with the Northern Rivers artists David Calrow, Frank Miles, Robert Todonai and Robert Pope.[10] He described the work as "a surrealist take based around my view of where we are coming from as humans and where we are going".[10]

In 2021 he donated his painting Hangin' Around, depicting a female orangutan and her young, to be auctioned in Malaysia to raise money for a minibus for a children's home in Kedah; The Star described him as a renowned Australian painter.[8]

Stevenson said he worked in no single style, attributing this to the range of artists he met through his television work.[11] His later pieces, inspired by visits to Hong Kong, were three-dimensional: he applied gold leaf and ceramics to the paintings and sealed them under an acrylic polymer to build up texture.[11]

He held solo exhibitions at Elizabeth Bay House in Sydney and at Prouds Gallery, both in 1984, and at the Laguna Wildlife Gallery in the United States in 1988. He took part in group exhibitions at the Galloway Gallery in Brisbane in 1985 and 1988, Visions Gallery on the Gold Coast and the Hoisser Gallery in Brisbane in 1987, the Los Angeles Design Center in 1987, and Gallery Nino Tucci on the Gold Coast in 1988.[5] By 1990 his work was held in institutional and private collections in the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.[5] His work has been offered at auction in Australia since 1988.[4]

Colour In Your Life

[edit]

Stevenson created and presented Colour In Your Life, a documentary series, also broadcast as Put Some Colour In Your Life, in which artists are filmed making a work in their own studio.[2][11] Each episode was built around Stevenson visiting an artist and discussing what inspired them; presenters overseas hosted some episodes, though he said most participating artists asked for him.[11] Ahead of the first broadcast he said the series was intended to take viewers into the studios of practising professional artists to show how they worked, calling it "a show that is run by artists for artists".[9] Founded in Australia in 2009 and produced by Colour In Your Life Productions, the series ran to 301 episodes across twenty-two seasons and part of a twenty-third, and was made by five film crews.[2]

The program was produced at Murwillumbah and by 2014 employed seven local staff.[7] It first went to air on the Brisbane station Briz TV in November 2010, with a national rollout planned for the following January;[9] the first national series screened in 2011,[7] the Tweed Daily News reporting that it had taken three years to reach air.[6]

By June 2014 more than 100 episodes had been made and a seventh series was in production. The program was then broadcast weekly in Australia on the free-to-air channel 4ME and on the Aurora channel on Foxtel, and in New Zealand on Sky, Cue TV Invercargill, Gisborne TV, Dunedin TV and North TV.[7] Stevenson said at that time that the series had 300,000 viewers worldwide.[7]

By 2013 it was being distributed to China, parts of Europe and the United States, with a reported European audience of more than 80 million,[6] and it was later viewed in more than 50 countries.[2] According to the Tweed Daily News, it was nominated for a Logie Award in 2012.[6]

Artists documented in the series include Ken Done, Margaret Gurney, Alison Hale and Anne Marie Graham,[2] and the watercolourist Joseph Zbukvic.[7]

The production company also staged exhibitions, opening a gallery in Brisbane Street, Murwillumbah, in 2014.[7]

By January 2017 the series had run for six years and reached 200 episodes.[12] In 2018 Stevenson produced Colour in Canberra, a version of the series devoted to artists in the Australian capital, in which seven local painters took part. The project was funded through Tourism ACT after the chief minister, Andrew Barr, invited the agency to invest in it, and was accompanied by an exhibition at Regatta Point that February.[13]

By 2020 it had film crews in the United Kingdom and the United States and had covered more than 260 artists in ten years, each episode taking about a week to produce.[11] It was by then distributed through Amazon and the Apple TV app and on a Chinese pay-television network, and Stevenson said it was due to begin airing on a pay network, Binge TV, in the United States.[11] Travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic halted filming that year.[11]

Full episodes of the series are included in the Lunar Codex, a project that places digitised archives of art, literature and music on the Moon, within its Minerva collection.[2][8] Stevenson said the documentaries were to be nickel-plated onto a hard drive able to withstand gamma radiation and placed in a time capsule on the lunar surface; a launch failure delayed the project.[14]

Recognition

[edit]

In 2013 Stevenson founded the Paint Your Life Fund, a not-for-profit organisation providing art therapy and creative relief to people in the community.[12] The same year he received an Arts and Cultural Achievement Award in the Tweed Shire Australia Day awards, for his contribution to art in the region.[6]

In the Australia Day 2017 Honours List, announced on 26 January 2017, he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia, with the citation "For service to the visual arts."[3] The award was reported in the United States by the art magazine Fine Art Connoisseur.[15]

Death

[edit]

Stevenson died on 5 June 2022.[16][4] Eric Rhoads, publisher of PleinAir magazine, described him as "a dear friend and a true innovator".[16]

References

[edit]
  1. 1 2 Alderton, David (1991). The Atlas of Parrots of the World. Drawings by Graeme Stevenson. TFH Publications. ISBN 978-0-86622-120-7.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Television & Small Screen — Colour In Your Life". Lunar Codex. Retrieved 31 August 2026.
  3. 1 2 3 "Mr Graeme John Stevenson OAM". Australian Honours Search Facility. Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Award ID 1155243. Retrieved 11 August 2026. For service to the visual arts.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 "Graeme Stevenson, Australia, 1958–2022". Australian Art Sales Digest. John Furphy Pty Ltd. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Germaine, Max (1990). Artists and Galleries of Australia. Vol. 2 (3rd rev. and enl. ed.). Roseville, New South Wales: Craftsman House. p. 647. ISBN 978-976-8097-02-6.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Manley (10 March 2013). "Colourful artist shares his passion with millions". Tweed Daily News. Retrieved 31 August 2026.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Gardiner, Sue (20 June 2014). "Colour up your lives, like thousands of TV viewers". Tweed Daily News. News Regional Media. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Tan, Jeremy (18 October 2021). "Auction for funds to buy minibus for home". The Star. Malaysia. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Noffke, Kirsty (30 October 2010). "TV show aims for national exposure". Tweed Daily News. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
  10. 1 2 Williams, Patrick (9 November 2009). "Painting with numbers". Tweed Daily News. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Anthony, Bob (13 May 2020). "Virus keeps TV series host brushing up at home". Tweed Daily News. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
  12. 1 2 "Three from Tweed make 2017 honours list". Tweed Daily News. 26 January 2017. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
  13. ↑ Wakwella, Ruwendi (14 February 2018). "Seven Canberran artists colouring outside the lines". Region. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
  14. ↑ Hopman, Sally (10 May 2023). "Canberra artist has designs on the moon and back, via Queanbeyan". Region. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
  15. ↑ Webster, Andrew (2 February 2017). "Honoring His Global Reach". Fine Art Connoisseur. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
  16. 1 2 "We Will Miss You, Graeme Stevenson". OutdoorPainter. PleinAir magazine. 6 June 2022. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
[edit]

Category:1958 births Category:2022 deaths Category:Australian painters Category:Australian illustrators Category:Bird artists Category:Australian television presenters Category:Recipients of the Medal of the Order of Australia Category:People from New South Wales

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Graeme_Stevenson&oldid=1373694620"