Ben Waters, known for his distinctive graphic style, captures the sweeping landscapes of Pittwater and their ethereal tangle of eucalypts. He is one of the beloved artists represented by Michael Reid Northern Beaches. His work combines realism and abstraction to create pieces that resonate deeply with viewers.

We are delighted to share news of Ben’s upcoming exhibition, The Moments in Between, a considered exploration of the quiet, often overlooked intervals that shape how we experience time, memory, and perception.

Through a body of work that lingers in subtle transitions rather than grand gestures, the exhibition invites viewers to slow down and notice what typically goes unseen: the pauses, thresholds, and fleeting states that exist between beginnings and endings.

To register your interest, please email: sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

British born, Nicola Woodcock is a self-taught Sydney based artist working out of her studio on the Northern Beaches. She was a finalist in the 2025 Waverley Woollahra Art School 9×5 Landscape Art prize, and has been a finalist in The Northern Beaches Environmental Art Prize 2023, The Little Things Art Prize 2023 and in the 2021 and 2022 National Emerging Art Prize. Nicola’s work has featured on sold out collections with Melbourne based ethical clothing label NancyBird.

We’re pleased to share news of Harbour Flora, an upcoming exhibition by Nicola Woodcock — a new series of works shaped by time spent walking the bush tracks around Sydney Harbour, from Spit to Manly and Bradley’s Head. Harbour Flora offers intimate reading of the harbour’s edges — where pathways wind through bushland and the natural world asserts itself in both subtle and striking ways. The works carry a sense of movement and stillness at once, inviting collectors to linger in their layered surfaces and tonal shifts.

“In Autumn this year I began walking the Sydney Harbour trails as a weekly ritual — moving from Spit to Manly, Bradleys Head to Chowder Bay and on to Balmoral — seeking both exercise and mental clarity. Along these foreshore tracks I observed the native flora growing through sandstone, leaf litter and coastal scrub, becoming increasingly aware of the shifting colours and textures of the season. Walking through the landscape brought a sense of liberation and peace. The act of walking the trails along the harbour’s edge sharpened my attention to the resilience and sculptural beauty of the native plants: banksias a glow against dry earth and clumps of delicate flannel flowers emerging through tangled bushland. Back in the studio, these observations became a small collection of oil pastel artworks shaped by memory, movement and atmosphere. Using a palette of earthy reds, browns and ochres contrasting with jewel-like bursts of colour, these artworks explore the native flowers I encountered on the Sydney Harbour foreshore walking trails.”

To register your interest, please email: sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Autumn Nights at the Bowlo is a new body of work by North Coast artist Leona DeBolt. Her practice is driven by an expressive energy, grounded in curiosity and a commitment to experimentation.

Working primarily on canvas, DeBolt explores non-traditional materials to build richly layered, textured, and playful surfaces. Guided by instinct and an openness to process, she continuously reworks each piece until it reaches a sense of balance. Her paintings emerge through this intuitive dialogue, where spontaneity and intention exist in equal measure.

Drawn to abstracted portraiture, DeBolt constructs her figures through layered applications of acrylic, oil, enamel, raw pigment, pastel, and charcoal. Her work moves fluidly between control and release, embracing uncertainty as an essential part of the process and allowing each piece to unfold organically over time.

Set against the gentle rhythm of Wooli’s coastline, DeBolt’s latest series, Autumn Nights at the Bowlo draws on memories of holidays spent with friends—those treasured autumn evenings along the narrow strip between river and ocean, where the sound of waves mingles with the distant hum of a band at the local bowlo.

These portraits capture a cast of characters gathered at a fibro fishing shack, suspended in the quiet in-between of dusk as the sun slips below the horizon. Tinny in hand, they linger in easy conversation, where fleeting moments take on a quiet significance and the everyday is rendered enduring.

To register your interest, please email: sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Melbourne based painter Betra Fraval has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the Victoria College of the Arts and has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne since 2008 at institutions including Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, C3 Contemporary Art Space and Res Artists, Glasshouse Studios. Her work has been included in group exhibitions since 2007 in Victoria and New South Wales and internationally in Finland, Peru and France at institutions including Gippsland Art Gallery, The Dax Centre, Bayside Gallery, Bus Projects, Bundoora Homestead, Victorian College of the Arts and Seventh Gallery.

Betra has undertaken residencies at Bundanon, NSW (2025), Sanskriti Kendra in India (2009), Sachaqa Centro De Arte in the Amazon Rainforest, Peru (2018), Hôtel Sainte Valière in France (2019) and the Helsinki International Artist Programme in Finland (2019). She has been a finalist in the John Leslie Art Prize (2024, 2020, 2016), the Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize (2022) and the R&M McGivern Prize (2019). Betra’s work is held in the collection of Artbank, Gippsland Art Gallery as well as private collections in Australia and internationally.

“These recent paintings explore landscape as physical and psychological terrain where external and internal states converge. In homage to moments of vulnerable immersion within the landscape after a period of personal upheaval, they seek lightness without denying weight. They indicate my shift toward intuitive, gestural language as figures and forms hover between emergence and dissolution. Paint is just within my control, pooling, bleeding and settling intuitively. The tender pieces hold the need to find release within a demanding world, expanding my broader inquiry into letting go—of certainty, productivity, and fixed identity—to landscapes that emotionally shape and hold us.”

Her paintings open into soft, atmospheric spaces where colour drifts and forms gently dissolve – expansive, peaceful terrains that invite you to slow down and fully immerse yourself. There’s a quiet, contemplative energy throughout. Rather than sharp detail or contrast, Fraval builds her landscapes through layered gestures, allowing paint to bleed, shift, and reform. The result is a kind of visual stillness – deeply absorbing, and almost meditative.

To register your interest, please email: sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

In Dirty Work, Jordy Hewitt uses abstract painting to explore emotional and bodily experience through layered, gestural mark-making, treating painting as a physical and “messy” process of labour. The works focus on how feelings and inner states can be built up through material actions like repetition, texture, and paint buildup, with meaning emerging through the act of making rather than depicting anything literal.

Essay by Freya Bennett:

“Dirt is the womb of all becoming. It signifies beginning, fertility, renewal and life. But it also holds us in death, taking what was once ours and returning it to the earth. In Dirty Work, Jordy Hewitt doesn’t shy away from mess and grit. The raw energy of her emotion is alive on the canvas, drawing us into her world, because Dirty Work is a response not just to Hewitt’s world, but to our world at large. Our precious, turbulent world.

Hewitt’s paintings feel cathartic to witness, like a big, yawning, ancestral scream, a release of tension after years of hidden darkness. Dirty Work feels like getting your hands into the soil, feeling tangible life rather than witnessing horror through a screen. Dirty Work is deeply grounding, but also weightless in its release. Dirty Work is about meeting yourself where you are and letting go of where you hoped to be.

In Hewitt’s brushstrokes, I see a mother holding a child, a precious gem mid-formation, a bird nestled in the clouds, observing with the warmth of a beloved. I see an acceptance of life’s difficult parts—more than acceptance, a celebration of them—for it is through pressure that we emerge luminous.

The word “dirt” is often used to describe something shameful, something ugly to be brushed away or scrubbed out. But there is nothing shameful about ugliness. Life is a delicate balance of the ugly and the beautiful, and as we grow, as we age, the things we once deemed ugly often reveal themselves as beautiful, as our vision becomes more sophisticated. Life comes from mess, life comes from pain and difficulty; life has no interest in our crude ideas of perfection.

To witness Hewitt’s Dirty Work collection is to feel held within the unknown, and to allow the weight of things to become part of our story, without taking away the divinity that is a soft breeze, a cocoon opening, an eyelash falling, or a sapling emerging.”

To register your interest, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

“These paintings observe the quiet language of the body through small gestures that unfold within the intervals of everyday life. Partial views of hands, fabric and skin isolate fleeting interactions: a hand resting on cloth, the tying or loosening of a garment, the quiet contact between body and surface.

“The works dwell within brief moments where the body pauses, settles, or gathers itself. Often unfolding within private domestic spaces, these acts of adjustment and contact carry a quiet tenderness: small movements that suggest an atmosphere of gentle interiority.

“The compositions hold the feeling of something briefly observed. Transitional moments are suspended between movement and stillness, inviting the viewer to consider how touch and tactile awareness can anchor attention, slow perception, and cultivate intentional pauses that foster embodied awareness amid the banality of everyday life.” – Emma Currie

For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to present The Markers – our first exhibition from award-winning Boorloo/Perth-based contemporary painter Natalie Scholtz. Working across painting and drawing on canvas, paper and board, Scholtz draws on a deeply personal yet broadly resonant narrative shaped by her experience growing up in Western Australia, raised by immigrant parents of Persian and South African heritage.

Scholtz’s richly layered compositions delve into the in-between – where boundaries between self and other, human and non-human begin to dissolve amid sweeping, expressive painterly gestures. Faces merge, forms shift and subjects resist fixed definition, giving rise to images that are at once allegorical and intimate. Grounded in community and social exchange, her practice gives fluid form to the messy, fleshy intricacies of identity.

For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Sunshine Coast Hinterland-based painter Lauren Jones makes her much-anticipated return to Michael Reid Northern Beaches with By the Hillside – an exquisite new series of still-life paintings developed from her studio in Mapleton.

Celebrated for her bold, immediate brushwork and impressionistic sensitivity, Jones approaches still life as a living, responsive form – one that remains perennially porous to the conditions of its making. “I think of these works as reflections of time and place, shaped by the light, atmosphere and rhythms around me,” she says, describing a practice that distils the fleeting qualities of her hinterland surroundings into painterly moments that feel intimate yet expansive.

With By the Hillside, Jones turns her attention to country gardens and feminine, effortlessly arranged interiors – spaces that conjure warm feelings of the family home and the quiet, intentional act of creating beauty within it. Loose and abundant floral arrangements, patterned textiles and timeworn vessels become intimate markers of daily life, where gesture and composition elevate the ordinary into something enduring and poetic.

As the seasons shift, so too does Jones’s palette; in contrast to the punchier hues of her most recent series – which channelled the languid mood of summer in a rambling weatherboard Queenslander – By the Hillside feels awash with autumnal tones. Dusty pink dahlias, juniper greens and berry-toned ginghams sit alongside delicate white anemones and unfolding Japanese windflowers, while natural seagrass baskets and loosely stacked books usher in an understated elegance, allowing light and gesture to take centre stage.

Here, the hillside is both a literal and poetic presence. “It informs the mood of the work, the crispness of morning light, the gentle turning of the season, the hush that settles into the landscape,” says Jones. “By the Hillside invites viewers to slow down and attune themselves to subtle shifts in tone, texture and light. It is a meditation on seasonality, the beauty of restraint, and the quiet, enduring dialogue between artist, home and environment.”

For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Celebrated South Australian contemporary painter Brenton Drechsler makes his highly anticipated return to our beachside gallery with his first solo exhibition since the announcement of his joint representation by Michael Reid Northern Beaches and Southern Highlands. Stripes 6 – Open Doors arrives after his star turn in the 2025 edition of Michael Reid Sydney’s year-end group survey, Painting Now.

“This new body of paintings shifts from foreign urban streetscapes and vintage vehicles to the interiors of my own home, as well as spaces encountered during my travels,” says Drechsler, whose global roaming gives way to interior scenes steeped in personal valence.

Once again nesting his signature green-and-white stripe within his pictures – a recurring graphic motif he likens to a kind of painterly proxy – Drechsler sees painting as a way to inscribe a sense of self into the spaces he inhabits, whether far-flung, familiar or festooned with objects that suggest an imminent gathering of friends. “The works build on the cinematic quality of earlier paintings while focusing more closely on intimate, lived-in environments, characterised by intensified brushwork and an experimental pastel colour palette.”

For all enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Celebrated contemporary painter and lifelong Northern Beaches local Ben Waters is a major force within the creative community of our idyllic slice of coastal Sydney and one of the most distinctive interpreters of our local environment. Ahead of his next solo exhibition – set to open at Michael Reid Northern Beaches on Thursday, 18 June, with previews available for registered collectors in the coming months – Waters recently teamed up with leading Australian furniture marque King Living for an art-meets-design collaboration with a distinctly Northern Beaches spin.

In the resulting Creative Spaces video series, the artist takes viewers inside his Avalon painting studio and reflects on colour as a means of expressing a deeply felt connection to his natural surroundings. “I’m always looking at the lightness and darkness of colour and how that fits together,” says Waters in the online story accompanying the Creative Spaces video. “If it’s busy and the colour is too loud, there’s too much going on. That’s not what I experience in nature. There’s always a combination of busyness and calm.”

A selection of available works by Ben Waters can be viewed and acquired below alongside an excerpt from the artist’s Creative Spaces collaboration, which can be explored in full on the King Living blog. With the artist’s bodies of work routinely acquired in advance of exhibition openings, collectors are encouraged to sign up for previews and priority access to his forthcoming projects, including his next solo exhibition at Michael Reid Northern Beaches, opening this June.

To register for first access, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au