The community is invited to pay tribute to the life of Phillip Island artist and environmental activist Jan Bodaan.
The celebration of Jan – who died in December at the age of 95 – will be held at Berninneit on February 7, at 11am, with guests invited to “dress in your most colourful and festive clothes”.
Jan was an impressionist painter, renowned for her portraits and paintings of the natural world.
She moved to Ventnor in 1983 and initiated the island’s first life drawing group, providing a base for local artists to get together, which led to the formation of the Phillip Island Artists’ Society.
She was also heavily involved as an environmental activist, political campaigner and socialist.
“I dislike capitalism as it creates rivalry and status based on power,” Jan told the Advertiser in an interview in 2012.
“Socialists put the environment before profits.”
Jan led an environmental battle against the proposed Salt Water Creek development at Ventnor in the 1980s and she was also part of a campaign to ensure former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett didn’t return to office.
Mr Kennett had vast development plans for The Nobbies seal watching area.
“There was no development as such there.
“We all loved to look at the Nobbies and go for beach walks in the area.
“There are areas on Phillip Island, where there was nature previously, that are being developed in an ugly and unimaginative way.”
She said the title she cherished the most was that of mother and grandmother.
“Before we are anything else we are family,” Jan told the Advertiser in 2012.
Island home
Jan, who was later married to Richard, first holidayed on Phillip Island as a teenager in the 1940s, when it was little more than beaches and jagged cliffs.
“There was a lovely guest house at Summerlands, a Wuthering Heights style of house.
“There was just the bush and wild beaches.”
Jan enrolled in the National Gallery School in Melbourne to study painting full time.
She later spent many years on the Gold Coast, where she eventually won the prestigious Gold Coast Art Prize, and returned to Phillip Island a decade ago.
