Johanna van laar /Senior Teacher-Artist

Johanna is a Ryde based artist who is passionate about painting, especially in oils, with a focus on realist portraits and landscapes as well as more contemporary scenes. She also paints in other mediums and works in pencil and charcoal drawing and print-making techniques such as lino, wood-block, dry-point, collagraph and metal-etching. She has begun branching out into contemporary clay, such as air dried and polymer days, and has also worked with traditional day and kiln-firing techniques using glazes.

Johanna is a qualified Primary School teacher with a Bachelor of Education, a Diploma of Visual Arts, and a Diploma of Teaching and worked for nearly thirty years in Primary (K-Year 5 and Intermediate (Year 6 and 7) schools in New Zealand as a classroom teacher, a Specialist English Second Language Teacher for almost ten years, then as a Specialist Art Teacher in an Intermediate School for a few years, before emigrating to Australia.

Johanna has participated in Exhibitions at Uxbridge Arts and Culture Gallery and Te Tuhi Art Gallery in Auckland New Zealand, and in Exhibitions at the Sydney Art School. She was also a finalist in 2017 in the Hornsby Art Exhibition with her Painting of a Contemporary Paris Cafe scene entitled 'La Cremaillere·.
Johanna has been teaching Fine art class/course at Prince gallery art School since 2019.