Traumatic journey to create hope from the ashes

Traumatic journey to create hope from the ashes

23 December 2009

published by mordialloc-chelsea-leader.whereilive.com.au


Australia — RYE artist Robert Klaas Kalma has put his heart and soul into his latest exhibition, Black Saturday Firestorm.

Klaas Kalma, 70, has painted five acrylic artworks representing the bushfires that devastated Victoria last summer.

He plans to sell all five by tender, preferably together as a group, and will donate proceeds to the Royal Children’s Hospital cancer research unit.

For a man who lost a daughter, 12, and his first wife to cancer and has survived his own battle with the disease, it has been a “traumatic” personal journey.

Having fought bushfires himself in the 1960s and suffered from burns after a car accident, Klaas Kalma saw an opportunity to use his art and his affinity with bushfire victims for a good cause in memory of his daughter, Helen.

“I have a practical and emotional understanding of what people affected by fire go through,” he said.

His paintings include embers and charcoal from the Yarra Glen and Kinglake areas mixed into the paint.

The exhibition is at the Mornington Library until January 14, and then it will move to Kozminsky Gallery in Bourke St, Melbourne, until March 18.

Traumatic journey to create hope from the ashes


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