Of all the feminine spirits manifesting as nature’s principles, the Divine Crystalline brings forth the perfectly ordered structure of the solid elements from which our whole galaxy is formed.  As one of the universal foundation energies, all life depends in one way or other upon her being.  She provides life with elemental materials and then continues to radiate her influencing energies in ways well understood by eons of those with knowledge of her esoteric core.  Her confident gaze emanates from her most ancient wisdom and benevolent purpose.  Her geometric crystalline beauty materialises in forms of glistening clarity, ethereal translucence or solidity asserting her indomitable strength, perfectly aligned with all that makes this awe-inspiring universe. 

Head sculptured from handmade 40gsm mulberry Kozo with crystals of 30gsm archival glassine on a foundation of Arches hot pressed 300gsm cotton papers.   Ink tinted face details.


Divine Crystalline     

I‘m inspired by music and the musicians.  Jazz is one of my favourite genre.  I listen to music continually as I work,  so, it was natural to create portrait tributes to a few of my favourites for  my inaugural exhibition in the Caroussel du Louvre, Paris, in 2019.  During a break in a live performance by Don Burrows, I approached him backstage to ask if he would kindly allow me reference poses from which to create his portrait. He humbly agreed. In 2019 the time was suitable to sculpt that piece in his honour.  Sadly, since then he left our earthly presence. It left me so glad I produced this work commemorating who I think was Australia’s greatest ever woodwind jazz artist.  Created in my “Impressionist Sculptured Paper” style, named so for my desire to capture life and expression, while clearly revealing the nature of the delicate papers.  

It’s like painting three-dimensionally using paper as the medium to achieve the same life.  Based on a foundation of Arches 300gsm hot-pressed French cotton and German cold-pressed cotton papers, worked over in a variety of ink and dye tinted Asian Mulberry and Hemp papers, some as light as 4gsm, on the hair. 
 Framed in limed solid pine with silver fillet. Acrylic glazed ready to hang.

- Published in the Special Edition of Observica contemporary art magazine,  17th issue- Impulse Edition/2022

2,200AUD ( Excluding shipping) 

Portrait of Don Burrows - Australian Jazz Woodwind Legend

I‘m inspired by music and the musicians.  Jazz is one of my favourite genre.  I listen to music continually as I work,  so, it was natural to create portrait tributes to a few of my favourites for  my inaugural exhibition in the Caroussel du Louvre, Paris, in 2019.   Sven Libaek is a personal friend who inspired me since childhood.

Created in my “Impressionist Sculptured Paper” style, which is named after my desire to capture life, expression and movement without sacrificing the obvious nature of the paper.  It’s like painting three-dimensionally using paper as the medium to achieve the same life.  Based on a foundation of Arches 300gsm hot-pressed French cotton and German cold-pressed cotton papers, worked over in a variety of ink and dye tinted Asian Mulberry and Hemp papers, some as light as 4gsm, on the hair.  Framed in limed solid pine with silver fillet. Acrylic glazed ready to hang.

- "Talent  Prize Award in Art Show International Gallery's ""PORTRAIT"" International Juried Art Competition, LA, California
- Merit Award - Faces Competition / Grey Cube Gallery USA 2021"

2.200AUD ( Excluding shipping) 

Portrait of Sven Libaek - Australian-Norwegian Distinguished Composer 

I‘m inspired by music and the musicians.  Jazz is one of my favourite genre.  I listen to music continually as I work,  so, it was natural to create portrait tributes to a few of my favourites for  my inaugural exhibition in the Caroussel du Louvre, Paris, in 2019.   Liane Foley is a superb French singer, songwriter and performers  both in English and French.   

Created in my “Impressionist Sculptured Paper” style, which is named after my desire to capture life, expression and movement without sacrificing the obvious nature of the paper.  It’s like painting three-dimensionally using paper as the medium to achieve the same life.  Based on a foundation of Arches 300gsm hot-pressed French cotton and German cold-pressed cotton papers, worked over in a variety of ink and dye tinted Asian Mulberry and Hemp papers, some as light as 4gsm, on the hair. 

Framed in distressed white limed finish solid pine with silver fillet.  Shatter-proof acrylic glazing, ready to hang.

Honorable Mention, “Portrait” art exhibition, Art Room Gallery, 2022

2,200 AUD ( excluding shipping and packaging) 

Portrait of Liane Foley - French Jazz Vocalist

Apart from nature I love portraiture and wanted to tackle this subject with the challenge of my “Impressionist Sculptured Paper” style.  I‘m inspired by music and musical artists and of among my favourite genres is jazz.  I was therefore, naturally attracted to create portrait tributes to a few of my favourite artists for my inaugural exhibition in the Caroussel du Louvre, Paris, in 2019.   
Anne Ducros is a superb French singers, songwriter, and performer both in English and French, whose music I love.  Based on a foundation of Arches 300gsm hot-pressed French cotton and German cold-pressed cotton papers, worked over in a variety of ink and dye tinted Asian Mulberry and Hemp papers, some as light as 4gsm, on the hair. 

Framed in distressed white limed finish solid pine with silver fillet.  Shatter-proof acrylic glazing, ready to hang.

Merit Award - Faces Competition / Grey Cube Gallery USA 2021
Honorable Mention, “Portrait” art exhibition, Art Room Gallery, 2022

2,200 AUD ( excluding shipping and packaging) 


Portrait of Anne Ducros - French Jazz Vocalist

 
High-level business dealing “Suits” in blue and grey represent two tycoons locked in an iron-clad handshake like hook and tow, firmly pinioned together in contract.  Everything about them is cold steel polished and formal. The abstracted face-to-face heads in the background show stern, implacable, stoic dispositions. No place for soft-at-heart. 

A metaphor about dealing in the tough game of high stakes business.  
Study the piece up close you will see the fabric texture, and every thread of the sewn buttonholes.  The steel looks like polished chromium, but it is entirely sculptured in paper, hand coloured with permanent inks.  The background is hot pressed Arches of France 300gsm watercolour paper overlaid with 8gsm Japanese Tengushu.  The hands are of mould-made hot-pressed calendared stocks of varying weights.  The threads are created by fine slicing of paper strips.

Box framed in a white satin enameled solid timber and glazed.  Ready to hang.

1,300 AUD ( excluding shipping and packaging) 

Secure Handshake 

I do not labour my sketches, I leave them loose and when a shape I like appears, I immediately begin visualising it in 3D. It’s natural for me to find myself scrawling forms that somewhere in my life relate to memories of objects in nature.  
From my palette of the varieties of papers I store, I consider the textures and colours that might suit, and start tearing and moulding them into shape, roughly based on the preliminary sketch, and just watch what happens. 
“Eroded Blue” evolved from the memory of something geologic I might have found lying on a plain with wind swept eroded forms exposed to the elements, revealing beautiful textures and remnant shapes like something bearing a crystal coated inner face.
Made from a variety of German mould-made and Asian recycled, handmade papers bearing a mixture of shredded inclusions.

Framed in a limed Tasmanian Oak hardwood base fitted with a box of acrylic glazing.

2022 | Las Laguna Art Gallery | Light and Shade Online Exhibition | California | USA

1,400 AUD ( excluding shipping and packaging) 


Eroded Blue

A personal exercise.  Wasps have always been my favourite insects, but the Spider Hunters, (Family: Pompilidae) in particular. Pompilids are known for succumbing Tarantulas in the Americas. They are solitary hunters often boasting beautifully bright orange or red warning bands, as here.  This is Cryptocheilus species, about 4cm long in real life.  It hunts spiders under the bark of trees like this Eucalyptus on which it is pausing and basking momentarily. Spider activity can be seen by the traces of their webs still clinging to the bark as ants scurry past disinterested in their distant ancestral cousin’s looming presence. 

Sculptured from Arches (France) 310gsm cotton hot-pressed mould made papers to create the body core. Covered with a variety of handmade Hemp, Flax and Kozo (Mulberry) papers to createthe textures. The bark is of coloured mulberry papers.  The individual body hairs are sliced from machine madepaper to take advantage of its directional grain strength, not a property of papers made by hand.  The wings are of transparent Glassine Paper. The spider webs are the long Kozo fibres teased from the source paper.  Colours are mostly acrylic inks applied by airbrush.  Inks unlike paint change the colours of the paper fibres without altering its natural texture.  

Box framed in maple-stained solid Australian hardwood with gold fillet edging.  Glazed and ready to hang.

Silver Winner, Dimensional Awards, New York, USA  

4,500AUD ( excluding shipping and packaging) 

Spider Hunter Wasp 

From my love of insects, this work was originally created for reproduction by Australian Geographic Magazine. The art depicts the life cycle of Australia's most recognized cicada Cyclochila australasiae, or as it is known by its common names, the Green Monday Cicada or the Greengrocer.  Beginning in the bottom circle, the fully-grown nymph emerges from underground where it has spent up to seven years, feeding on sap syphoned from the host tree’s roots. Having climbed up the trunk and clinging to the bark, it releases itself from the old nymph skin, (called exuviae), expands its wings and climbs to the branches where males sing to attract females. After copulating, females deposit their eggs in cracks with the bark. On hatching, the almost microscopic new nymphs drop to the ground completing the cycle. 
Entirely sculptured from Arches (France) 310gsm cotton hot-pressed mould-made papers with a variety of handmade Hemp, Flax and Kozo (Mulberry) papers. Insect bodies are sculptured in calendared, hot-pressed stock to give the realistic shine.  The bark is of varying thickness coloured Hemp and Flax papers on an amature of the sculptured cotton stocks creating the tree forms. The wings are of transparent Glassine Paper, as used in archival storage interleafing. Colours are mostly acrylic inks applied by airbrush.

Ready to hang in a limed, solid Tasmanian Oak, glazed timber frame.

- Bronze Winner, Dimensional Awards, New York, USA
5,500AUD ( Excluding shipping) 

Life Cycle of the Cicada 

Symbolically, this work is based on the conspicuous decline of our Christmas Beetles.  In the web of life, beetles are both important as plant pollinators and agents of the nutrient cycle at root level.  Their curl grubs and wriggling pupae were once common in most backyards but are increasingly rare to find.  For that reason, I omitted the pupal phase to bring attention to an obvious interruption somewhere in their live cycle.  Not to speculate on causes, insects are very resilient, and provided we are aware of our surroundings such that we may be able to manage our interactions for the better, a pinned museum specimen may not be the only way future generations see these beautiful creatures. The triangular frame signifies a pivot point, (also the algebraic symbol delta = change).

Sculptured 30gsm handmade Kozo paper, Mulberry Tengushu with Hahnemuhle NOT and Arches hot pressed cotton sheet-formed papers, (not papier maché).  Single colour ink tinting and background wash.

Box framed in a unique custom-made, isosceles triangle shape from Australian Tasmanian Oak with limed satin varnish.   Shatter-proof acrylic glazing ready to hang.

Selected artwork for Gallerium Art Prize  " EXTINCTION: Save the Planet 2022" exhibition
Selected artwork for National Entomology Insect Expo, Melbourne, Australia 
Mention Honorifique - Professional Artists Competition - Mondial Art Academia, France 2020
8,000AUD ( Packaging and shipping excluded) 

A Call to Change

I often go to where I can be at one with nature.  Nothing grounds and calms me the same way.  More than ever in the recently stressed times I find myself needing to be surrounded by trees, flowers, birds, and the ever-present activities of small creatures like bees, butterflies, and dragonflies. I love to observe them, and their forms fascinate me. It inspired to create this piece in the pure natural shades of the handmade papers I use as my palette; papers made from fibres sourced from nature like the subject matter depicted. There’s an integral relationship between my medium and objects in the composition that helps preserve the connection with the natural world from which I draw such valuable peace and centering. We all need a little of tranquility.

Sculptured from Hahnemuhle (Germany) 300gsm cotton NOT, Arches (France) 310gsm cotton hot-pressed mould made papers and a variety of handmade Hemp, Flax and Kozo (Mulberry) papers from  Awagami (Japan) and other Asian sources, some as light as 4gsm. 

Box framed in distressed white limed Australian Tasmanian Oak with shatter proof acrylic glazing, ready to hang. 
8,000AUD ( Excluding packaging and shipping) 

Tranquility

In Melbourne’s inner-city heart are the beautiful Royal Botanic Gardens.  They’re criss-crossed by pathways from all sides so those from immediate surrounding communities and far beyond can access and enjoy this peaceful, tranquil, green kingdom of ancient oaks, figs, conifers, and other magnificent giants.  A noble community of greenery ushering all who enter this place of respite, to wander through, rest, and explore this wonderland away from pressures and stress of busy human lives, discovering an amazing diversity of plants.  Here the diversity our of communities melt into one with a common sense we all belong together through our connection with nature.  It’s a place where animal communities too, inhabiting the richness of environments reigned by these green sovereigns mingle with people. Ferdinand von Mueller, the garden’s first director, whose commemorative bust looks on would be proud of the treasures today filling this truly royal botanic community for all life.  

Sculptured from Hahnemuhle (Germany) 300gsm cotton NOT, Arches (France) 310gsm cotton hot-pressed mould made papers and a variety of handmade Hemp, Flax and Kozo (Mulberry) papers from Awagami (Japan) and other Asian sources, some as light as 4gsm.  Single colour ink tinting and background wash.
Set inside a five-sided shatter-proof clear acrylic case allowing exceptional visibility of the full depth of the art from all angles, with no shadows cast by frame walls. Ready to hang with split batten system or D-rings.  

23,000AUD ( Excluding packaging and shipping)

Green Dominion 

A stroll in the Australian Royal Botanic Gardens, Cranbourne, part 3/3. Wandering north by east we pass a sculptured rockpool waterway, to landscapes characterised by ponds and rivers, home to water birds like the   not so common Eurasian Coot. These waters are rimmed by contrasting arid landscapes dominated by tough Mallee flora over the rise called Howson Hill, festooned with flowers busily attended by all manner of insect pollinators.   Strolling on to the northwest, the gardens transform into dry, sandy, coastal environs where only hardy bushes like Melaleuca bent by salt winds, tough little succulents and tiny flowers of bizarre structure like Goodenia survive.  Here the iconic symbol of these three Australian Botanic Garden series, Xerochrysum brachiatum - the Paper Daisies - hold their ground around Seaside. 

Sculptured from Hahnemuhle (Germany) 300gsm cotton NOT, Arches (France) 310gsm cotton hot-pressed mould made papers and a variety of handmade Hemp, Flax and Kozo (Mulberry) papers from  Awagami (Japan) and other Asian sources, some as light as 4gsm. Single colour ink tinting and background wash.

Box framed in distressed white limed Australian Tasmanian Oak with shatter proof acrylic glazing, ready to hang.

Merit Award | To Seaside | Yellow - Art online exhibition | Art Room Gallery | USA | 2022
Merit Award - Botanicals Competition / Grey Cube Gallery USA 2021
Silver Medal - Professional Artists Competition - Mondial Art Academia 2019| France
Second Place - Botanicals Exhibition - The Art Room Contemporary Gallery 2019
8,000AUD ( Excluding packaging and shipping) 

To Seaside

A stroll in the Australian Royal Botanic Gardens, Cranbourne, part 2/4.  In entering these gardens, a left turn on the pathway takes us northward past a magnificent Ironbark stand followed by Box and Peppermint Eucalypts, and the distinctive Scribbly Gums with their bark decorated by abstract washes, like paintings. Nothing, however, compares with the bizarre form of the “bristly” grass trees. Curious little flowers like Grevillea, Acacia pom-poms and Correa bells festoon the many shrubs frequented by the male Fairy Wrens that dart about accompanied by their twittering harems of inconspicuous females.  Enticingly our pathway changes to a “scribbly” looping form as it leads us into a wonderous landscape of cycads and ferns that once dominated Gondwana in the Palaeozoic Era, 180 million years ago. 
Sculptured from Hahnemuhle (Germany) 300gsm cotton NOT, Arches (France) 310gsm cotton hot-pressed mould made papers and a variety of handmade Hemp, Flax and Kozo (Mulberry) papers from  Awagami (Japan) and other Asian sources, some as light as 4gsm. Single colour ink tinting and background wash.

Box framed in distressed white limed Australian Tasmanian Oak with shatter proof acrylic glazing, ready to hang.

- Finalist Stanthorpe Art Prize 2021
- Gold Medal for Creativity - Professional Artists Competition - Mondial Art Academia, France 2018 
- First Place - Nature Exhibition - LightSpaceTime Gallery Florida 2018.
8000AUD ( Excluding packaging and shipping) 

The Path to Gondwana

A stroll in the Australian Royal Botanic Gardens, Cranbourne, part 1/4. On entering The Red Sands Garden, the visitor is treated to a landscape design of colour and breathtaking view that is so like experiencing Australia’s Red Outback it almost needs focal adjustment. For the flora that thrives here, it’s in fact a harsh yet wonderous environment supporting only tough plants of short stature, often bearing fascinatingly beautiful floral structures like those of the Desert Rose and bizarre, aptly named Kangaroo Paws. Bottle brush flowers such as Banksia make a popular source of nectar for pollinating birds like Helmeted Honeyeaters. A closer look reveals fan shaped Scaevola half-flowers and curious Lichen covered forms looking like branched abstract sculptures. 

Sculptured from Hahnemuhle (Germany) 300gsm cotton NOT, Arches (France) 310gsm cotton hot-pressed mould made papers and a variety of handmade Hemp, Flax, and Kozo (Mulberry) papers from Awagami (Japan) and other Asian sources, some as light as 4gsm. Single colour ink tinting and background wash.

Box framed in distressed white limed Australian Tasmanian Oak with shatter proof acrylic glazing, ready to hang.

- "Honoring the Earth Day 2022"  international  online group exhibition, Diversia 2022, Exhibizone, Canada
- Finalist Stanthorpe Art Prize 2021
- Second Place - Botanicals Exhibition - The Art Room Contemporary Gallery 2019 
 - Second Place - Botanicals Exhibition - LightSpaceTime Gallery Florida 2018.
8000AUD ( Excluding packaging and shipping)

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Ray Besserdin

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