By Victoria Stone-Meadows
A scratchboard artist from Cranbourne has received awards for her work that put her in the top echelon of artists who work with this medium.
Carol Gorenko took up scratchboard art about four years ago and has come leaps and bounds in the scratchboard community.
Scratchboard art uses a Masonite board that has a layer of white clay, and then a layer of black India ink over the top of that.
Artists use fine tools such as scalpels to gently scratch away at the ink to create an image on the board.
The artform is not widely practised in Australia and Ms Gorenko made the move to scratchboard after many years of painting and drawing in other mediums.
“I’ve always been into the arts and have spent many years doing oils paints, pencil work and things like that,” she said.
Ms Gorenko recently took home the top prize at an art competition in Brisbane in the scratchboard category as well as winning the award for best in show.
“Scratchboard entries in the art show came from all over Australia and Overseas,” she said.
“I won first prize in the scratchboard category out of about 41 entries, then of the six categories, one winner of each category is chosen as best in show and I also won that.”
“I was very excited, I couldn’t believe it.”
Her winning piece “Work Mates” depicts a horse and a blue heeler dog together and Ms Gorenko said it was inspired by her favourite childhood stories.
“I grew up reading the silver brumby series; they were my favourite stories as a kid,” she said.
“Typically my works take about 150 hours to make, working on it whenever I get a chance; it’s a medium you can sit in front of the TV and do.”
“It’s very therapeutic and it helps me to relax and is something you kind of drift off into the zone while doing.”
Winning the awards at the art show in Brisbane has given Ms Gorenko international recognition for her work.
She said she is always working on something new and is looking forward to having her upcoming work displayed at the AGRA gallery in Camberwell soon.
