Stir crazy from the coronavirus lockdowns and with a show to paint, fellow artists Ondine Seabrook and Holly Greenwood and I made the thirteen hour car trip from Sydney to Broken Hill. The car was filled to the brim, stocked up with paper, paints and camping gear. There’s something really special about hitting the road, the feeling of exhilaration and freedom. You enter this bizarre inbetween space where flashing scenery and whole towns become transitory. Places to passby instead of destinations in themselves. You look out and are grabbed by images and colours, your pulse stirred by whatever song is playing on the stereo. There are moments where oceans of blue foliage hold themselves in yellow soils and you see the dust turn from gold to red, trusses of sticks leaching into the sky.
Made of Dust is my meditation on the sensations of being in the landscape once we arrived. Camping in creek beds and waking up before dawn to capture the changing light. The colours leached into my eyes, and my hands attempted to spurt out it’s composition. Watching a painting disappear as rain fell from swelling clouds in a place that was supposed to be desert. Forgetting myself on the side of a mountain, all frozen fingers, colours and wind.
Like the road and the transitory towns, the paintings use empty space to allow the flow of the gestural brush marks to breath. A gentle play of oppositions. Monet stated that “Emptiness matters as much as fullness, and reflections have the weight of things.” I hope these paintings communicate a gentle reflection of my time spent on the Wilyakali lands of the Darling Basin and that the still life’s communicate the strange resonance of separation once home.
Bronte Leighton-Dore 2020
Whether surrounded by nature or in a sundrenched corner of her Darlinghurst studio, Bronte Leighton-Dore is inspired by the joy that comes from being wholly in the ‘now’. Informed by an abiding interest in psychology, spirituality and Buddhist theory, her painting practice captures a profound desire to be in the moment and appreciative of her surroundings.
Leighton-Dore works quickly. Across both her landscapes and still lifes there is a sense of urgency, a need to capture the transitory beauty before light fades and flowers wilt. Her landscapes begin as plein air studies which are then recreated in the studio by painting on the floor rather than an easel. Working from above gives a sense of what extends beyond the canvas – the land and movement beyond the frame. The same sense of time and place is achieved in her still lifes by ensuring her studio arrangements are temporal and constantly shifting. Filled edge to edge with colour and texture, these works hero quirky combinations of everyday objects, elevating the mundane to something equally as picturesque and uplifting as the Australian bush.
This duality in her practice, the focus on both interior and exterior spaces, speaks to the dualities across all areas of life – natural worlds and manmade, stillness and movement, flux and repose – the human need to find balance in a constantly changing world, and the shared experience between herself and her audience.
Bronte Leighton-Dore graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art from the National Art School in Sydney in 2018. Highly Commended in the 2019 Paddington Art Prize, she was a finalist in the Wynne Art Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales the same year. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since 2017, including the National Art School’s showing at Sydney Contemporary in 2019.
We're thrilled to announce Bronte Leighton-Dore is a finalist in the Paddington Art Prize and has won the UNSW Art and Design Print Prize. The prize will offer Bronte the opportunity to create a limited edition print with Master Printer, Michael Kempson.
The Paddington Art Prize is a $30,000 National acquisitive prize, awarded annually for a painting inspired by the Australian landscape. Established in 2004 by Arts Patron, Marlene Antico OAM, this National prize takes its place among the country’s most lucrative and highly coveted painting prizes.
Image: 'By The Murray River, Corowa' oil on board 110 x 170cm
Bronte Leighton-Dore's work is part of Wangaratta Art Gallery's exhibition 'Contemporary Landscape Perspectives: A Group Show' from 13 March – 30 May 2021.
This dynamic exhibition of five contemporary landscape Australian painters, Max Berry, Holly Greenwood, Dan Kyle, Bronte Leighton-Dore and Andrew Pye explores individual perspectives of elements of the Australian bush, the terrain, landscape and key symbolism of trees and flora in their immediate environment.
All five artists are emerging as contemporary painters in the Australian art scene. Berry, Greenwood, Kyle and Leighton-Dore are New South Wales based (Sydney and Blue Mountains), the four have partnered with local artist Andy Pye, the group have connections both through friendship but also their oeuvre, their painting practice and style. Each artists surrounding environments are re-interpreted in large scale paintings and works on paper.
This collection of artists and their work presents a diversity of expression and contemporary representation of the Australian Bush.
The Prize is a $30,000 National acquisitive prize, awarded annually for a painting inspired by the Australian landscape. Established in 2004 by Arts Patron, Marlene Antico OAM, this National prize takes its place among the country’s most lucrative and highly coveted painting prizes.
The prize encourages the interpretation of the landscape as a significant contemporary genre, its long tradition in Australian painting as a key contributor to our national ethos, and is a positive initiative in private patronage of the arts in Australia.
Image: 'The Shadows Run Both Ways, Berambing NSW, 2019, oil on board, 124.5 x 172.5 cm.
Bronte Leighton-Dore is a finalist in the 2019 Wynne Prize. The Prize is awarded annually for 'the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture by Australian artists’.
This open competition is judged by the trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Finalists are displayed in an exhibition at the Gallery (although in the early years all entrants were hung). Many winning paintings have become icons in Australian landscape art, entering the collections of public galleries, including the AGNSW.
Bronte says of her entry, "...My painting is an attempt to give sense to the engulfing yet expansive nature of the landscape, as the eucalyptus trunks, the fallen leaves and the tufts of native grass become jewels of colour when suffused with light."
Image: Installation view "Blue to eye's touch, Merlin's Lookout" 2019, oil on board, 124.5 x 172.5 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
Stepping into Tomorrow, an art collective headed by Sep Pourbozorgi and Thomas John Whelan, presents Sweetness of the New, a group exhibition that approaches classic Australian imagery with a refreshing, optimistic, contemporary bent. The collective prides itself on finding the pleasure and value in contemplation, believing there is “no better way to celebrate our past than by stepping into tomorrow”. The collective "sees art as a medium that extends over generations, location and circumstance; uniting a multi-faceted national identity and aesthetic". The opening night of Sweetness of the New is on Thursday 25th of January from 6-9pm, and is open until the 28th of January, from 11am-6pm on Friday and Saturday and 11am-3pm on Sunday, at Yellow House Sydney, 57-59 Macleay Street, Potts Point, NSW.
