Steve Giese is an artist and art teacher and has been a Lismore resident for the last 25 years. His teaching role at the Lismore TAFE is now based on campus at Southern Cross University. Steve took some time between classes to share his story with Sara Browne.

I’m originally from the Clarence, round Maclean, but I trained in Lismore in the mid-80s and worked away in cities around Australia and came back to Lismore about 25 years ago.

I trained in Visual Arts at the Northern Rivers CAE, as it was known back then, which was the first version of SCU. Then it became UNE and then it became Southern Cross University. It was downtown. We were the first degree group to go through, there were about 20 people. A lot of those people are still active in the arts.

I came to painting through childhood activities. My father did some painting but he was a musician so creativity was in the household. Post high school I studied literature and history so I was all set to become an English/history teacher but then I just kind of caught the bug of making art.

I was teaching English in Grafton. There was a little TAFE course on a Wednesday night and I went along and became completely besotted with making pictures. My first solo show was at the Grafton Regional Gallery when I was straight out of art school.

I can do most genres. I can do still life, landscape, figure and so on but the thing that I’m probably best known for is social commentary – looking at what’s going on in the world. My first training was in history so I’ve got an eye on what’s happening so…geopolitical stuff, the rise of China, environmental issues, the Anthropocene, the way the economy is slushing between rich and poor – all of those sorts of things are interesting to me from a visual point of view. Not many people touch that stuff.

I think art is a lot like food. There’s fast food, vitamin pills, 10-course banquets – I think art is like that too. Some art is like the canary in the coal mine and raises consciousness about important issues. A lot of art is just decorative and that’s ok too. I don’t have any hierarchy of what is the most important art. But the stuff that tends to get my attention is things that comment on the world. I like it to have a relevance.

For my students, it’s very much about their personal stuff. There’s a spectrum of creative missions. On one end you just make art for sale – find out what sells and make that. Or there’s art that comes from a very personal imperative.

People are often driven by politics, religion, identity - those sorts of things. And that’s fine too. Trauma is really a key factor in why people express stuff. The flood is still settling but I think a lot of people have been really affected by it and it’s coming out in their work.

Nowhere to Land, part of the Lismore Regional Gallery collection since 1992, it was about climate change, ironically destroyed by the 2022 flood

I’m the only full-time art teacher here. I teach painting, printmaking, art history and drawing. This is my 33rd year of teaching adults, 25 years at Lismore TAFE. We’ve been relocated here at SCU since the flood. I don’t know what’s happening with the TAFE building. I’m no authority on this stuff but I think people were waiting on the flood report to come out before they made decisions about rebuilding.

We lost about 25-35% of students from the flood. I got a lot of calls saying ‘lost my job, lost my home, have to leave and go to Sydney or Melbourne.’ There was a lot of that.

My house went under. Every bit of art work I’ve done for the last generation got wet and damaged. It’s still there but it’s really been damaged. Anything that was done on a board has swollen and some of the paint has detached. Works on paper got soiled by the mud. I’ve got a lot of stuff but it’s all been compromised. Old work is sort of like a moment in time that’s been crystallised on a piece of paper so there’s a bit of sentimental attachment to it. There’s probably an exhibition or two in that work.

I’ve been working constantly since the flood. I’ve had a little personal determination not to let the flood stop me doing what my primary purpose on Planet Earth is, which is making pictures. So, I’ve been making a lot of pictures. About the same as before. I do one significant work a fortnight but I’m working every night.

I do a range of things – sculpture, prints, paintings. I usually have a plan. A lot of artists work very spontaneously, I don’t. I think ok, what is really important to be said? And then I’ll do that. I draw, research. The stuff I’m known for comes entirely from imagination but within that, if I need to paint a rat for example, I’ve got to go do some rat research. See how far the eye is from the ear...does a rat really have a pointy nose or is it more shaped in a different way?

I’m not sure how my students would describe me as a teacher. I do try to show up with something prepared every day. Both my parents were teachers. They were pretty active during the 70s and I can remember them saying education is all about the student experience - one of the things teachers should do is keep an eye on the pastoral care. Treat each student as an individual. Respect and acknowledge where everyone is coming from. I try to do that, to be as empathetic as possible.

There is a huge variety of people that come through in an educational setting. My father was a high school teacher and my mother was an infant’s teacher. I had my dad as a teacher once when I was very little. He was teaching at a very isolated school, Palmers Island, near Yamba.

I’ve got two sisters, one is a teacher and one is an academic. Education has been a big theme in the whole family. My parents weren’t overly strict. My father was a raving atheist. He was pragmatic. He was very interested in the piano and when he didn’t have a piano, he volunteered to play for the local Anglican church in Yamba on the condition that he could go in and practice. He would go in and play Beethoven, Mozart and Bach, not the psalms.

That painting is La Nina, the drunken woman wreaking havoc in our community. I had to do that picture just to get it out of me - to get out the anxiety of having your entire life swatted by this climate event.

It’s a thing that 20,000 Lismore people experienced. Art is a great way of kind of trafficking some of that anxiety out of you. When you’re painting a picture like that, all those emotions are being invested into every stroke and at the end of that, I thought, yeah I’ve got that out of me. That’s one of the benefits. Sales and prestige and profile – they’re all well and good – but that intrinsic thing of getting your inner stuff out is of great benefit to your mental health.

I don’t think you need talent to do that. I think you need good training. The talent/performance thing is something we teach here and now. The latest science – and it has become a science - is that talent is just a general inclination to be interested and everything else is training. So, it’s the amount of time you put into something, it’s your responsiveness to criticism, it's having good criticism available, and opportunities to try your work.

I’m really interested in art history. It's one of the things I teach but that’s my weekend reading. I’ll read an art history book on gothic art or something similar. If you’ve engaged with art history to the extent that I have, there is wonderful influences all over the place.

I’m the least travelled person you’ll ever meet. I’ve been from the Clarence River postcode to the Lismore postcode and that’s about it. I’m pretty connected to the environment and family and don’t like to leave them. I can tell you that Rubens’ great painting ‘the Fall of the Damned’ is in the Munich Pinakothek and John Russell’s portrait of Van Gogh is in a museum in Amsterdam ...maybe one day I’ll see them. Maybe not.

I have a couple of kids. They’re not really artistic, they have other interests. It’s a really difficult thing to make a living out of. But I’d encourage everybody to be interested in visual culture. It’s a part of becoming culturally mature.

Patrick White used to say that Australia is a kidult culture, it's not quite grown up. His proof, he reckoned, was our addiction to sport – which gets results in 90 minutes of football. But life is not like that, life is full of ups and downs and greys and so on.

His other proof of our cultural adolescence is our addiction to travel. It’s rich coming from him because he was well travelled himself. But he reckoned while ever we’re snuggling up to other people’s cultures, we never quite get a culture of our own. I thought that was an interesting view point. People who can, should make culture in their own environment. That’s one of the reasons I’ve never been that interested in travel.

I’ve had a sense of being an artist since I was quite young. It's sort of like a visionary calling. I was an imaginative kid, a quiet kid, with worlds going on inside. Making pictures is a way of getting that stuff out. My parents were encouraging of that. A lot of people’s parents say ‘get a real job’, mine always bought me art books. My father did some paintings and that was a good thing to see happening.

Some of my work is a little bit antagonistic and gets people’s hackles up. If they said ‘I think there’s a problem with your use of colour in that painting’ I’d say ‘alright tell me what you mean by that.’ I’m up for criticism, I think it’s good. The more criticism you get, the better you become.

The Flood 2017, linocut

There’s a few private things I’d probably never exhibit or sell but the artwork that I produce is mostly an adjunct to my teaching practice. I’ve made a deal with myself – if you’re not painting regularly, you shouldn’t really teach painting. If you’re not drawing regularly, you shouldn’t be teaching drawing. That’s one of the reasons I produce a lot. But if you do that all the time you end up with a stack of work so you can then go and have exhibitions.

I’ve got a print show coming up at the Northern Rivers Community Gallery in January so I’ve got to get busy and make that happen because a lot of the prints were destroyed by the flood. I’ve got to produce some new ones. Beyond that, I’ll go into competitions. That’s about as much as I can do. I’m a full-time teacher, 5 days a week.

Not all my work since the flood has been connected to the flood. There has been some escapist things. They have been a bit dark I must say…some with rats on mobile phones looking at cauldrons full of people boiling away.

There’s a lot of things going on; the economy, geopolitics. There’s a sense of unease and anxiety out there in the world at the moment so if I feel that, I’ll try and make a picture for it. You’ve got to be a bit cautious, there’s a lot of sensitivities out there, stuff about race, gender, identity – they’re really big kind of flashing light subjects in the world so if you’re going to enter a visual conversation with that stuff you have to be very careful.

Right now I’m still teaching and giving that my absolute. Without bragging, I’m probably at the top of the game that I can play at the moment given the experience that I’ve had. I still think I’ve got a fair bit to offer in an educational setting.

Beyond that, I’ll be retiring sometime soon and devoting the rest of my life to making pictures and exhibiting. When I stop teaching, I’ll start getting serious about exhibiting. A lot of artists my age have got long-term networks with galleries that I don’t have. I’ve never had time to cultivate them because I’ve been teaching. I’m nearly 63.

I’m very comfortable here. I’ve got family in the area and I like Lismore. It’s a robust community with a really good cultural spectrum. No matter what you’re into in Lismore, you can see blues music, a good movie, you can go to art exhibitions. And I also feel I’m giving to the community. I’ve probably taught a couple of thousand people over the years and many of them I still bump into. I love the town.

I’ll possible retire somewhere else possibly, just for environmental reasons, I might end up in the bush somewhere. It’s been a great town, I’ve loved being here, for a whole generation now.

I’m completely aware of how badly people have been hurt by the flood. The only option is resilience. We’ve got to be as tough as we can be and get back to life as normal as soon as we can. I was in Newcastle at the time of the earthquake and seeing that community rebuild after a natural disaster like that was interesting. You’ve got to be tough. I’ve got faith in Lismore.

Linocut titled '28/02/22'

I don’t believe in the invisible stuff - not any deity or spooky things like ghosts - but I believe in being an ethical person. I like the stoics. I like their view on the world. I hope to live an authentic life, as moral as possible, everybody slips up from time to time. I should have cultivated a network in the arts to a greater extent than I have. To be at nearly 63 and basically, I’ve got no commercial gallery contacts for that success. I’ve taken a career path within education. But not too many regrets.

I like surfing, mountain bikes, going bush. Wild environments – that’s what turns me on, getting into the wilderness. Down the Clarence coast would be my favourite surf spot. My father was a sort of amateur ecologist so we’d go for big walks into the bush and he’d identify all the plants and animals so that’s kind of stuck to me.

I’m very grateful for the career opportunities I’ve had. The arts is very tough, for our graduates to find exhibition spaces and career paths is very hard. So, I’m grateful for the fortune I’ve had to be able to get into education. I never take that for granted.

Lismore has been a good town to be in. We should be proud of Lismore. I’ve got a t-shirt which says ‘Lismore – cradle of western civilisation’. I did it. I only did one.