Jubilee Community Care client Lainie Taverne’s art has taken her around the world and now she has found a home in Brisbane’s western suburbs. Lainie has long been a sculptor, painter and teacher, sharing her love of the fine arts after finding that creating artworks herself was very therapeutic.
“My first marriage broke down so I recovered from that by doing art,” Lainie said. “I got involved with the Sculptors’ Society Gold Coast where I was president for many years. I ended up back at university to complete a Fine Arts degree, a teaching degree in Art and English and then a Masters of Education. I got a job teaching on the Gold Coast and taught up until I was 72.”
In 2001 Lainie lived in Japan, exhibited there and taught in a school. “I also met a South Korean artist and we did international art exchanges between Australia and South Korea,” she said. “I ended up in South Korea and did two exhibitions over there and artists came over here to exhibit at the Gold Coast Arts Centre. We had about four exhibitions there with international artists from South Korea, Japan, China, Malaysia and a few other countries.”
In 2015, Lainie and other artists from Australia, New Zealand and Turkey commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing during World War I with an exhibition titled War and Peace at the Gold Coast. “It was a fabulous exhibition because it bought together countries that were fighting together in the war,” Lainie said. “We also actually planted some pine trees on the Gold Coast which was very significant because of the pines in Gallipoli.”
Multiple trips to Florence, Italy, followed where Lainie organised art tours and exhibitions and was a student herself. “I was learning sculpture and painting from two very well known sculptors and painters there,” she said. “The training you get from working with brilliant artists is so different. There was nothing in Australia that could compare to what I was being taught there.”
Four years ago Lainie met her second husband Aart when teaching a Wax to Bronze workshop. “I had been teaching at the Sculptors’ Society for many years,” she said. “Aart was an orthodontist and had been working with wax and was interested in the workshop. We married and I moved from the Gold Coast to Brisbane. It’s been lovely and I have a good life. We are putting together a studio at home so I can continue to work.”
“I have a passion for making people feel good and regain their confidence through art,” Lainie said. “That is very rewarding. People want to make a difference in other people’s lives. That’s why Jubilee’s staff do their jobs and why I love teaching and making a difference too.”
The support from Jubilee has been invaluable in recent years. “I ended up with two broken ankles and I couldn’t have managed without Jubilee’s support,” Lainie said. That chapter in Lainie’s life is now cast in bronze, with Lainie having created a sculpture of a foot in a heeled shoe, showcasing the pins that were placed and later removed in Lainie’s feet as a result of her surgeries.
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