ANN Mitchell has been a Carmelite nun for more than 50 years, and an artist for even longer.
“I used to draw when I was a kid,” she said. “I drew cats and dogs from cartoons and Corn Flakes packets, copying photographs or pictures from comics. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been involved in art, but not seriously.”
A retired nurse (she did her training in Broken Hill), Mitchell devotes almost all of her artistic time to rendering animals, and Going, Going, Gone, opening this Friday night at the Broken Hill City Art Gallery, is an exhibition driven by her love and longing for endangered or extinct creatures.
“It’s about the effect of man’s footprint on the earth, and the impact humankind has on so many species,” she said.
“I think there’s something like 41000 recognised critically endangered species throughout the world. I try to breathe life into them by painting them.
“For example, the horse is almost extinct in the steppes in Russia, and only two white rhinos exist. They’re both females.
“Then there’s the great auk, which was extinguished in about 1820.
“The last pair that were known were hatching an egg, and three Norwegian sailors had been asked to find specimens of them for this European fellow, who wanted to have them stuffed and put in his curiosity cabinet.
“So they killed the two adult birds and then crushed the egg, and that was the last of them.”
Mitchell paints primarily in watercolours, preferring the luminosity they bring to her portraits of living – or, once living – things.
“I love watercolour, because there are things you can do with watercolor that you can’t do with any other medium,” she said.
“You can just shade it into practically nothing. You can’t do that with acrylics and it’s very difficult to do it with oils.”
Mitchell said the exhibition represents several years of work, and that she owes a debt of gratitude to local artists who’ve assisted her over those years.
“I’ve had some very good teachers,” she said. “I spent a couple of years with Gary Fleming, who’s a brilliant artist. And then there are some locals like Wendy Martin and Ian Lewis.
“There are a lot of artists in Broken Hill I’ve had help from.”Going, Going, Gone opens Friday August 15, at the Broken Hill City Art Gallery at 6pm and runs through to Sunday, November 2.
