10 Australian Artists Making a Splash

This week The Artling's brings you 10 Australian artists making a splash with their artworks! From paintings to mixed media collages, these artists strive to capture their temporal experiences and the vast Australian landscape that surrounds them. They each have a unique interpretation of the land they call home, and this manifests through forms of abstraction, portraiture, and nature. 

Scroll down to learn more about these Australian artists, and the diverse ways they portray their homeland in their artworks! 

Joseph Villanueva

Melbourne-based artist Joseph Villanueva focuses on sgraffito abstract impressionism, working primarily in acrylics in his works. With a background in Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Joseph draws inspiration from the sensation of colours and textures in his surroundings. He enjoys scenes of landscapes in bloom, wonderous skies, garden vistas in explosions of flowers. His palette of choice is often bright and optimistic, echoing a free-flowing linework that dances over the surface. The elements of land, sky, and nature overlap in his paintings, and his technique is layered with consideration to the background colors and washes.

"Painting may seem totally abstract at first, but soon you'll realise the compositions are grounded in figurations and structural elements describing the flora, landscape, and bursting sky."

Eva Davis

A descendent of Irish emigrants, Eva Davis grew up in Brisbane near Noosa Beach, an ideal spot for surfing. With every artwork, she conducts thorough investigation of her subject matter, maximising the potential of a painting until it is completely exhausted. She is fascinated by man in its riddle and beauty. In her paintings, Eva gradually reduces the means of expression and infuses a calm fluidity, developing a characterstic motif in her works of an soft, circular shapes.

Julee Latimer

Julee Latimer takes on a dissective approach to art, creating artworks specifically to cut them up. With a strong interest in using dried paint, she employs the malleability of the materials by layering and weaving them. Her work explores the relationship between paint and canvas, which has become the driving force in her practice. To Julee, her life has been a patchwork of cultures and this plays out in her desire to deconstruct her work.

"I aim to surprise the viewer and generate conversation about the nature of painting."

Kate Powell

Born in Murringo, Kate Powell is a self-taught artist whose artistic inclinations began from an early age. She eventually settled into a career of Graphic Design, but she felt it did not offer her the creative freedom she yearned. She thus began experimenting with paint and found that it provided a more liberal outlet. 

Fascinated by texture and colour, Kate works across resin and acrylic mediums to produce offerings of painterly and abstract escapism. Her vibrant paintings posses a dreamlike essence with the intent to transport those who seek escape from the monotony of everyday life. Kate’s work presents a textural dance between controlled intentional brushstrokes, and the free form manipulation of a palette knife. 

Jennifer Bell

Jennifer Bell is known for her highly decorative paintings and paper weavings, which often highlight the beauty in the ordinary. Her intricate work explores pattern and visual perception largely influenced by her experience with an neuro-ophthalmologcal condition that causes her to continuously see patterned dots in her visual field. Jennifer's works draw upon the the Australian landscape that she grew up in that was surrounded by chintz patterns, such as toile. 

Katie Edwards

Katie Edwards is a self-taught artist based in Sydney. Her works are an abstract manifestation of a her sensory experiences; they reveberate the music she hears, reveal the scenes from the Australian landscape, and depict her experiences from her travels. She uses a number of techniques such as dripping, colour washes, and the saturation of under-layers to create a crinkling effect. With these textured layers, she paints abstractions of her encounters through a palette of pastels, fluorescents, and earth tones.

Ralph Kerle

Ralph Kerle is a photographer who captures abstract images of nature with a focus on water surfaces. Born and based in Sydney, his photographs reflect his meditative and therapeutic experiences kayaking on Sydney’s harbour where his observations of the abstract images on the water’s surface opened his mind to new doorways of perception and creative inspiration. Ralph seeks to represent and communicate these transcendental moments experienced on the water through his photography.

"My art is a series of photographs that capture moments in time when nature coalesces into visual abstraction on the surface of the water. They are images that nature has created and exist in reality. They are designed as peaceful meditations of the way we engage with the environment in which we live, reflecting how we think, see, and communicate our sense of being"

Pi Williams

Pi Williams has worked across a variety of disciplines including watercolour, printmaking, and acrylics. She now prefers to create pieces predominately with yarn and wool and is largely self taught in this medium. Pi strives to explore the boundaries of the technique by combining the textural wool with vivid thread, negative space, and mixed media materials.

Her creative process involves gathering inspiration from her environment before researching and testing ideas through painting. She experiments with various materials before bringing all these elements together in her textile pieces. They set forth intricate leaf patterns, detailed rock pools, and delicate petals on flower-like imagery; a microcosm of the Australian landscape. During her creative process, she lets herself be guided by intuition, allowing a unique showcase of movement and colour to evolve naturally.

Jacob Leary

Hobart-born artist Jacob Leary has worked across a range of mediums such as painting, prints, video, and installation. His tendency toward the dynamic has fed his preoccupation with assemblage. Creating artworks that operate within a series, Jacob allows for movement and development to occur. The investigation of aesthetic patterns and the philosophical theories inform how his artworks are executed. His resulting works are composed through an intense and laborious process, combining digital drawing with more conventional modes of hand-crafted assemblage and collage.

Lise Temple

Lise Temple's works abstracted landscape paintings explore the colours, contrasting light, and broad shapes of the South Australian landscape. To Lise, the progress of the seasons and the agricultural processes on the land create a series of transient views. During Lise's painting process, grass becomes gestural; roads are made into formal borders; and skies are fragmented and used as tonal intrusions. Her paintings then develop into an investigation of the temporal experience of nature. In all of the work, Lise aims to insinuate notions of form, space, and time, whilst leaving room for the viewer to create their own interpretations of the subject.

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We hope you've enjoyed learning about these Australian artists, and how they interpret the Australian lands through their distinctive visual languages.

To browse more of our curated art collection click here. If you need additional guidance or have specific requirements, you can have a look at our art consultancy services, or chat with our expert curators on any page.