Turning family tradition into an art form

For Jessica Mais Wright, the decision to be an artist was one she made with her eyes wide open, having grown up watching her parents, William Wright and Hilarie Mais, at work in their respective studios.

The three artists were in Canberra yesterday putting the finishing touches on their joint exhibition, Triptych, which opens at the Drill Hall Gallery this evening.

Now 30, Mais Wright recently finished post-graduate studies as the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and now lives in Sydney, close to her parents.

Although she began showing artistic promise as a child, she said it wasn't until she was a teenager worrying over the HSC that she set her sights on studying art. ''When you're younger, you go into high school and you're supposed to be learning the subjects that you're going to do later in life, but I wasn't thinking seriously. I took languages and music, and thought maybe science. It didn't really happen until later on.''

Her parents agreed yesterday that even while they watched the young Jessica make sculptures out of scraps of material in her mother's studio, they were careful not to push her.

''I think you have to naturally be drawn and evolve towards that career. I think the advantage of having parents in that profession is you see both the ups and the downs of that profession,'' Mais said.

Wright recalled yesterday setting artistic challenges for his young daughter when she was just five years old.

''Jessica wanted to draw, so we thought, what's the most difficult thing that's going to really make us see,'' he said.

''We collected a massive number of the most irregular things - oyster shells ... she had this whole bowl and did endless, wonderful drawings.''

Triptych is an extended version of an earlier show of the three artists' work held at the Galerie Dusseldorf in Perth in 2008.

The show was a momentous one for Wright, who, despite working full-time as an artist, curator and art teacher, had not exhibited since 1968, having bowed out of the commercial art world.

That show displayed the works in separate groups, whereas this most recent show has been blended together to demonstrate the common themes and differences in their work.

Wright said although the three had created very different abstract works, they were united by being ''process-oriented - the work is the outcome of its process''.