For most of his life, Emerald artist, Stewart MacInnes quietly created in the background with painting, sculpting, drawing and writing poetry not for fame, but for something far more personal and now, his family has brought that world into the light with a retrospective exhibition at Burrinja in Upwey, celebrating the late Mr MacInnes’s life and work.
The exhibition of Stewart MacInnes, ‘A Life in Art’, opened on Father’s Day, Sunday, 7 September, and will be open to the public until 19 October.
It includes decades’ worth of artwork across multiple mediums, alongside a short film featuring archival footage and interviews with family members.
Mr MacInnes, a long-time Emerald local, was a prolific yet private artist who rarely exhibited, his daughter, Cat MacInnes, said the family always knew how important art was to him, even if he never sought public recognition.
“There’s something he said once that’s always stuck with us, he said, ‘Art is the key to my existence, and it carried me through.’ That just says everything, really,” Ms MacInnes said.
“He didn’t do it for recognition. He did it because he needed to. It was therapy. It was survival. It was just something deep inside him that he had to do.”
Mr MacInnes’s wife, Carole MacInnes, said the idea for the exhibition was born in the most difficult of times, during his final months in care, when he was dying and visits were limited due to COVID restrictions.
“We could only see him one at a time, and during one of my visits, I told him that I really wanted to exhibit his work,” she said.
“And what I didn’t know at the time was that each of our children went in and told him the exact same thing, completely unplanned, that’s when I knew we had to do it.”
While his work was largely kept within the family, Mr MacInnes’s talent did receive early recognition, with acquisitions by the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of Western Australia shortly after he completed his art studies in the 1950s.
“There’s one piece in the NGV that’s absolutely masterful,” Mrs MacInnes said.
“And the one that people see first when they walk into the gallery now, it’s from that same period. It’s like a renaissance masterpiece in my mind.”
Yet even with this formal recognition, Mr MacInnes remained modest and uninterested in the spotlight.
“He wasn’t one to self-promote, he wasn’t like some artists who are always putting themselves forward. He just created, constantly, quietly, from the heart and the mind,” Mrs MacInnes said.
The exhibition includes a deeply personal short film made by Mr MacInnes’s grandson, which Ms MacInnes said was unexpectedly emotional to watch.
“There’s footage of Dad at the end that I didn’t know was in there. I wasn’t ready for it,” she said.
“It was really lovely to see him again, but really hard too. It kind of felt like he was in the room again.”
For the MacInnes family, the exhibition is also a way of sharing their memories and connection to individual pieces.
One painting in particular, featured on the catalogue cover and invitation, holds a special place in their hearts.
“That one’s not for sale,” Ms MacInnes said.
“It’s always hung on the main wall at Mum’s house. It’s just part of our family, really. And there are these beautiful little details, like when we were kids, he used to draw with us, and sometimes he’d hide a little cat or a rhino in the painting, just to make us laugh. Then he’d paint over it. But it’s still there underneath.”
Mrs MacInnes agreed, “It’s a very emotional piece for all of us. It’s part of our lives, and I think everyone in the family feels that. It’s not just a painting, it’s a memory.”
Mr MacInnes’s artistic practice spanned more than 60 years, beginning seriously around 1956, though he’d been drawing since childhood.
Over the years, he explored a range of mediums, painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and poetry, often working late into the night in his garden studio.
“He was a gardener by day, which he actually found really meditative too,” Ms MacInnes said.
“Then he’d come in, have dinner, and after that he’d disappear into the studio. He’d be out there for hours. It was just this constant drive, this need to create.”
Asked to describe his work, the family settled on three words: free-flowing, emotional, and honest.
“It was never contrived, it wasn’t uptight, it wasn’t planned out to be anything. It just came naturally. Everything he did flowed from a real place,” Mrs MacInnes said.
Although deeply introspective, Mr MacInnes’s poetry and artwork often focused on the human figure and condition, anatomy, shapes, and repetition -with a strong sense of identity present in each piece.
“There’s always a kind of presence in his work,” Mrs MacInnes said.
“You can see the person in the creation, it has a real weight to it, a personality.”
The process of putting the exhibition together was a family effort, from cataloguing, to layout, to design.
“It took about five or six months all up,” Mrs MacInnes said.
“We were lucky to have a creative family. Our daughter Catherine designed the flyer and catalogue, Helen made a beautiful book of all his work that’s available at the gallery, and there are also his poetry books. Everyone got involved. It felt right.”
Now, as the public begins to engage with Mr MacInnes’s work, the family hopes visitors leave with a sense of the man behind the canvas, not just as an artist, but as a human being.
“I hope people can feel the intensity and honesty in his work,” Mrs MacInnes said.
“He was a true artist. Quiet, but deep. Someone who created because he had to, because it was in him.”
