Blue Mountains Creative Arts Network (BMCAN) is a community of arts minded volunteers whose aim is to support and encourage the development of members’ arts practices. Along with BMCAN exhibitions, members regularly hold their own exhibitions.

Blue Mountains Creative Arts Network also presents curated and selected exhibitions at United Cinemas, Katoomba in The Gallery, and at other suitable exhibition venues. The exhibitions showcase the work of a diverse range of selected local contemporary artists – painters, photographers and sculptors. All works exhibited are available for purchase.

Welcome to the Blue Mountains Arts Trail with open arts studios throughout the year and formal Arts Trail Events scheduled during the year.

Please select from current Open Studio or use the Arts Trail map to select studios which suit you.

The 2018 Creative Leaders have been chosen for their contribution to the creative arts community in the Blue Mountains. Each year BMCAN will acknowledge 10 Creative Leaders. For 2019 we will highlight creatives who are leaders through the excellence of their creative art practice across the genres. This year they are:

Victor Peralta, Julie Ankers, Ann Niddrie, Natasha Sebire, Faye Wilson, Rae Bolotin, Meg Benson, Jo Clancy and Veechi Stuart.

Blue Mountains Creative Arts Network Members as well as opening their studios for Arts Trails or Open Studios, regularly exhibit or some even run their own galleries. To find out when and where you can go to the gallery listings here and work out your own tour of some of the Blue Mountains most interesting art.

If an artist is also part of a current Arts Trail or also has an Open Studio this weekend then click on the appropriate icon/colour/link.

We are a group of people in the Blue Mountains using the arts to explore and celebrate the ‘wild’ and our interconnected relationship with nature and one another, to engage with a philosophy of regenerative living, an attitude of inter-being with all things. In this we acknowledge the 60,000 year cultural relationship between Australia’s indigenous peoples and Australia’s natural environment, recorded in songlines, music, dance, art, storytelling and kinship structures.

The Talking Art Project seeks to tap into the resources of artists gathering together to shape and change culture, or just to ‘feed the creative spirit’ when the aloneness gets too much. It will be an incubator for wild ideas and creative collaborations, ideas that confront the significant issues of our time.

Artists often work in isolation, and the aloneness can lead to a kind of self or process-absorbed madness. No longer, or at the very least its a good excuse to get out of the studio for a cuppa!