Newcastle artist Kerrie Coles is marking her 70th birthday with the opening of her latest exhibition.

“November 2, 1948,” Coles says gleefully of the day she was born. “That’s why the opening is on November 2.”

As she says of the big day, “It’s better than not turning 70!”

For Coles, her exhibition, “Light Between the Latitudes”, celebrates not just a five-decade art career but also a life that could have been cut short.

She is a breast cancer survivor, having been diagnosed twice, in 1999 and 2006.

A reminder of the first cancer journey hangs in the converted woolstore apartment that she shares with her husband, Emeritus Professor John Rostas. It is a pastel work by Coles titled, “Spiritual Flight”, which she created in response to taking a hot-air balloon flight a week after her first cancer operation.     

“It was very early in the morning, I was alive, I had survived the operation,” she recalls.

The painting allows the viewer to see what the artist absorbed during the flight, looking down on the world through the gauzy morning light. It is not just a beautiful landscape but an insight into the artist as a patient. As Coles says, when you’re confronting cancer, “you’re up in the clouds”.

“Spiritual Flight” may remind Coles of what she fought, but in her home studio are the paintings of faces and places she was fighting for.

On one wall are portraits she has done of family members, including one painting that tracks her son and daughter growing up. It is titled, “My Children, How Fast They Grow”.

On the other walls, and on easels, are paintings she has been working on. Most of them are destined for the upcoming exhibition at the Art Systems Wickham gallery, which is just a stone’s throw from Coles’ studio.  

The paintings are mostly landscapes of places near and far. Many are of landmarks that Coles sees in her daily life, such as Newcastle harbour or the local beaches and coastal pools.

Others are almost like visual travel diaries for her, recording what she sees and how she feels while in other parts of the world, from India to Great Britain.

One painting she has recently finished and is resting on the easel is of the northern Welsh town of Llandudno. Coles and Rostas were staying in the seaside community, she glanced out her hotel room window, and the seeds of a painting were sown. As she said to her husband, “I just want to paint that.”

Yet on the road, she can rarely sketch, let alone set up an easel.  

“When we travel, I get frustrated I don’t have time to stop and draw,” Coles says.

As a result, she works up many of her paintings from photographs. Not that she wants her images to be photographic. Rather, she adopts an impressionistic approach.

“It’s the atmosphere,” she explains. “I’m trying to create that moment at that place where I looked at the light, the people, the clouds.”

Two elements consistently wash across Kerrie Coles’ paintings.

One is her love of light, and how it changes according to the time of day, the season, and where it falls.

In this upcoming exhibition, there are the colours that bloom in the late afternoon on the water and the rock faces at Caves Beach through to the soft,diffused light in Scotland and, when the rain clouds roll in, around Hobart.

The differences, and the similarities, in the effects of light on the various landscapes she has stood before has provided Coles with not just an unceasing flow of painting ideas but also the name of this exhibition.

Although instead of “Light Between the Latitudes”, she could have called it, “Happy 70th, Kerrie!”.

For the second element that stands out in Kerrie Coles’ painting is her joy of life. 

Or, as the artist herself describes what she paints, this is her “travelling through life, on my own journey”.

When that journey began in 1948, it was in Sydney. Coles attended the National Art School, studying painting, and she completed a Diploma of Education at Sydney Teachers’ College. In 1980, the visual arts teacher and her family moved to Newcastle.

She found a new environment to paint - “Newcastle is spectacular” - and a new home.  

Her first exhibitions in Newcastle were held at von Bertouch Galleries. Its creator, Anne von Bertouch, did more for Coles than hang her paintings on the gallery’s walls.

“She was my mentor, she was my friend, a wonderful adviser,” Coles says of the legendary gallery owner.

Anne von Bertouch was also a portrait subject for Coles. The artist’s depiction of von Bertouch was hung in the esteemed Portia Geach Memorial Award for portrait painting. For a later Portia Geach award entry, Coles painted another friend and mentor, Gil Docking, who was the first director of Newcastle’s city art gallery.

As well as pursuing her painting, Coles taught visual arts in schools until 1999. She had worked and painted through a marriage break up and a serious car crash. Then came the cancer diagnosis. 

In the face of so much loss, “I’d gone into a spiral. How do I cope with it?”

To cope, Coles changed direction. She went into arts administration, working as a director for Newcastle Art Space, then for John Paynter Gallery and the Lock-Up centre. When she had to undergo breast cancer treatment again in 2006, Coles continued working. And through it all, she painted. 

“It has kept me going through both cases,” Coles says. As she told a Pink Ribbon event, “My art was my salvation, it gave me a way to express how I was thinking and feeling without having to verbalise anything.”

With all the flowers she was given after her 1999 diagnosis, she painted still life works for an exhibition. Coles thought about painting a self-portrait while she had cancer but decided not to, “in case it was prophetic, as though I’m going to drop off the twig.”

Coles looked around and out, observing the world and painting it. And she looked back, learning from artists who had come before, from J.M.W. Turner to Lloyd Rees. While Coles says she loves contemporary art, she freely says her own work is not “cutting edge”. 

“My thoughts and ideas are more related to the traditional,” Coles says, as she looks at the works around her studio, which is astonishingly tidy for a painter’s space. There’s no splattered paint on the carpeted and Persian rug-covered floor to be seen.   

“I’m not a messy person, so I can’t be a messy painter.”

Above all, what Coles has looked for in the world and transferred to her paintings is beauty. 

Beauty inspires Kerrie Coles; it feeds her art and life. That, and family; between her and John, who she married in 2016, there are four children and “nine and a half” grandchildren (one is on the way).  

So the light between the latitudes is Kerrie Coles. Wherever she finds herself in the world, she looks for what makes her shine. And that means there will be plenty to celebrate on November 2 at the exhibition opening. 

“I think it’s wonderful,” says John Rostas. “I tell people that the opening is her 70th birthday, and they go, ‘My God, she doesn’t look anywhere near 70!’.”

“Oh, what a good husband he is,” replies Coles, before explaining, with a smile, what the exhibition means to her.  

“I’ve been very lucky to have been given the talent to paint.”