Jim Pavlidis, the award-winning illustrator who took out a Quill in 2022 for his satirical ‘Net Zero, Zero Net’ in The Age – of former PM Scott Morrison as a trapeze artist reaching for a lump of coal, but missing, and about to fall into a burning earth – has built a substantial artistic career beyond the newspaper.
Pavlidis retired from The Age last August and is now working full-time as an artist.
While many still draw a line between “artist” and “illustrator,” Pavlidis understands the instinct to categorise — especially from curators, he once told Neos Kosmos.
But for him, “an artist is one who lives the art.”
His latest exhibition ‘A Life in Storeys’, opens Thursday July 17, at Gallery Smith, Prahran.
The work is of the Richmond Housing Commission towers – some caught in the amber light of a dying day, others just before the anemic light of a Melbourne winter morning.
Pavlidis often paints the everyday, a truck crossing a bridge, a suburban house, an empty street, or wheelie bins. These seemingly mundane images, condensed in his hand, take on a quiet religiosity — almost iconic, in the firmest sense of the word. His illustrations are deeply personal, reflecting his life, his family, and his view of the world.
They also quietly carry the mnemonic textures of daily life in Melbourne, the light of a dying day, the essence of migration, the weight of ageing, and the reality of suburban life.
“I’m drawn to light and colour, especially when composed by banal or incongruous elements,” Pavlidis says.
“An abandoned shopping trolley partially obscured by a bin is visually interesting — it’s so ordinary as to be almost invisible. But when you look closely, there are many nuances.”
He compares it to life drawing — something he returned to over the past year. “It’s helped me greatly,” he adds.
Pavlidis credits his creative development to the artists and thinkers he’s met along the way.
“I was very lucky to meet and associate with many creative people, but it’s still taking a long time to find my own voice,” he says.
There is a stillness in his work — time and space caught in the amber light of dusk.
For years, he’s looked across at the Richmond Housing Commission towers from his home. “I’ve regarded them as studies in light,” he says.
“But inevitably, and no doubt influenced by being the child of migrants, I began to think about the many hundreds of lives that have passed through there. Especially at night, when the lights flick on and off in different flats.”
With the Victorian government planning to demolish all 44 towers across Melbourne, Pavlidis now feels “a sense of urgency to focus heavily on it before it’s gone.”
“The feeling of seemingly inconsequential things being important gets stronger with age,” he reflects. “I’m 61, my father died four years ago, my mum’s not very well, and I have friends getting sick — time is becoming less friendly.”
His work reminds us that even the most ordinary things carry the weight of lives, that ordinary lives are no different to less ordinary ones, and on the whole, we only stop to look.
A Life in Storeys, opens Thursday July 17 and runs until 9 August, at Gallery Smith, Prahran.
