Petra Pinn

& the art of the inhabited room

Like Magic

Petra Pinn paints rooms the way a good host furnishes them, with warmth, pattern, a considered eye, and always, somewhere, an animal making itself entirely at home. Working from a shed studio in her backyard on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, the German-born, Europe-trained painter has built a practice rooted in the pleasures of interior space, colour combination and the quietly surreal logic of a room that feels both familiar and imagined. A former textile designer whose influences run from the French Impressionist Edouard Vuillard to the light on Manly Lagoon at dusk, Petra now works across painting, printmaking and, most recently, ceramics. We spent some time with Petra talking about the animals who decide where they want to sit, the travel that never quite leaves the canvas, and why playing with clay feels, simply, so good.

There is a particular quality of light in a Petra Pinn painting, the kind that filters through leaves and lands on a patterned rug, or catches the edge of a teacup on a sideboard, or dapples the surface of a lagoon at the precise moment a heron decides to fish. It is the light of someone who has been paying attention: to the room she is standing in, the place she is walking through, the particular quality of a morning she wants to hold onto. Her studio is a shed in her backyard, and the paintings that come out of it are anything but modest. Petra trained as a textile designer, a background that is everywhere evident in her work, though never in a way that reduces painting to decoration. Pattern, for her, is a structural element as much as an aesthetic one: it sets the mood, balances the composition, carries the eye through the frame. A rug, a piece of fabric, a wallpaper, these are not props in a Petra Pinn interior but load-bearing elements, as compositionally significant as the animals she places among them.

Petra Pinn’s work is available at petrapinn.net, where she also offers art classes on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

@petrapinn