Godwin migrated to Australia from Malta in 1981. After completing a graphic design course at Randwick TAFE in 1987, he worked as a graphic designer for various companies for a number of years. He graduated with Honours in 2004 at the National Art School Sydney, majoring in painting. He also completed a Diploma of Education in Visual Arts at ACU University, Strathfield graduating in 2006.

The Edge of Reality

“When the veil of reality lifts, and an ordinary situation becomes strange, foreign and familiar all at the same time, a dreamlike state.”

There are moments during an ordinary day, when reality thins briefly, revealing something unusual, unexplainable, a hint of a darker, stranger reality that is lying underneath the one which we experience every day.

Sometimes, we see it out of the corner of our eye, and by the time it has our full attention, it is gone. So brief and illusive that we dismiss it almost completely. It can happen during the course of a casual conversation, someone drops a word or a phrase, about something they couldn’t have possibly known anything about. Suddenly, that comfortable feeling of habitude, of safety is shaken and we’re left with a feeling that anything could happen, reality cracks revealing that life could be strange, more unexpected, that strange things do happen and our complacency is gone. Then, in the next instance, that crack closes as we are left wondering if anything happened at all. This is a feeling that will always escape our full attention, it is gone the moment we focus on it. It will always only catch us unawares.

At other times, it’s a slight change in the quality of the light, a light that seems to be misplaced that throws us into this brief moment of flux. Ordinary everyday objects have a darker history, and we are allowed brief glimpses of these during moments of our everyday life.

These were the underlying thoughts that drove me to do these works. I realise that the theme might feel disjointed. There are works that feature goddesses, ghosts, still lifes with fruit and houses in which the light source is somewhat hard to explain, almost as if it is coming from within, rather than the outside.

I did not want to go out of my way to depict the strange, or the unexplainable and the bizarre. I wanted these feelings to permeate through the works very subtly just like the feeling itself, brief, fleeting, to be read between the lines. – Godwin Laus

Artist Statement

The relationship between the world around me, the visible world, and what I paint is an ambiguous one. I am not interested in representing the world at its face value in my painting. There are many devices that can do that much better and quicker than I can, cameras, iphones, ipads, can give you the perfect image in one instant. There is no meaning for me to try and create a mere representational picture that echoes the living world. I make use of my surroundings in order to disclose something that comes from within, in response to the world around me. An alchemistic change takes place that involves subject matter, materials, combined with myself and the visual world that changes all these things into something other than what they were at the start.

The line between abstraction or figuration blurs, fades and loses meaning. Another world emerges from a painting, a personal and distinctive world, related to what is seen but not enslaved by it. Line, colour, tone, shape, these are the “senses” of painting. When the painting is viewed from close quarters, another more ethereal quality emerges. The image fades and is replaced by pure and sensory aspects. Paint that is sometimes thick or thin, transparent or opaque, brush stokes that are varied, connecting passages, layers, a variety of shapes that either fuse together or clash, marks, daubs and lines, running and connecting. This is the real soul of the painting. We are living in a time where each artist has to stake out his own space and relevance. He has to create a certain process and progression that is both personal and individual. – Godwin Laus

Education

1984-87 Graphic Design Diploma, Randwick TAFE, Sydney

2001-03 BFA, National Art School, Sydney

2004-05 BFA, Honours, National Art School, Sydney

2006 Graduate Diploma of Education, (visual arts), ACU

Exhibitions

1994 Alice Doyle Arts Prize, Watsons Bay

1994 Balmain Arts Competition

1995 Finalist, Waverley Council Arts Competition

2001 Painting Competition 2001, NAS

2003 555, Stanley Street, Darlinghurst

2003 Grids, figures and rats, NAS

2003 Degree Show, Cell Block, NAS

2004 Refugees: Artist’s impressions

St George Regional Museum, Hurstville

2004 Honours Exhibition, Cell Block, NAS

2004 Drawcard Exhibition, Cell Block, NAS

2004 Finalist, Waverley Art Prize, Sydney

2005 Drawcard Exhibition, Cell Block, NAS

2007 Finalist, Waverely Art Prize, Syd

2008 Transitions 08,12 Mary Place Gallery, Paddington

2009 RedArt 2009

2009 Drawcard Exhibition, National Art School Gallery

2010 Dark, light and life, Gig Gallery, Glebe

2010 Finalist, Hornsby Art Prize

2011 ArtFido Art Prize Exhibition

2011 Finalist, Waverely Art Prize,Sydney

2013 The Birds and the Bees, Mils Gallery, Sydney

2013 Finalist, Hornsby Art Prize, Sydney

2016 The Lost Domain, Art2Muse Gallery, Double Bay

2016 Warringah Art Prize: Highly commended

2017 Northern Beaches Art Prize Finalist

2017 Anecdotes, Art2Muse Gallery, Double Bay

2019 Horizons, Art2Muse Gallery, Double Bay

2021 Harbour Dreaming, Art2Muse Gallery, Woollahra

2023 The Edge of Reality, Art2Muse Gallery, Woollahra

Awards

1994 Alice Doyle Arts Prize (Landscape)

2001 First Prize (Avant Garde Section) – NAS

2003 Chroma Award for Painting – NAS

2007 Waverley Art Prize – Highly commended

2016 2nd Prize, General category – Northern Beaches Art Prize