Charlene Walker
Landscape Abstract Artist, Cadigal Wangal lands Sydney. Exploring the beauty of the Australian landscape while confronting the challenge of Climate Change
Message"Since the first time I picked up a pencil, I knew art was to be my obsession."
Charlene Walker is an emerging artist based in Sydney. After studying Graphic Design at Randwick TAFE and Fine Arts at St. George TAFE, she received a BA in Visual Arts from the College of Fine Arts (UNSW) Sydney and went on to forge a successful career as graphic artist, designer & art director.
Working from her home studio in Marrickville, Sydney, Walker draws inspiration from a wide range of Australian landscapes. While being philosophically influenced by the impressionists and the formal language of modernism and colour theory, her painting style offers the viewer a space for reflection and an intimate connection to these re-imagined landscapes.
Charlene’s connection to the Australian landscape stems from her growing up in a bush encompassed Sydney suburb, moving to and spending her middle years on a farming property in Central NSW and through teenage years to adulthood spending long stretches of time on the rocky headlands and coastal forests of South Coast NSW.
For Charlene observation becomes the act of drawing & painting and is as innate and fundamental as breathing. It is when observation, visual imagination and the act of painting come together on the canvas, that those elements combine in a poetic resolution and a reflection of an inner world.
"Exploring the beauty and depth of the Australian landscape, what I hope to do is, somehow imbue my art with an reflective intimacy, it is a deeply personal reaction to my environment. I draw inspiration from impressionism and modernism, I strive to create an internal world, an internal logic, within each piece. In painting I hope to uncover the undiscovered within the work."
Statement
Living through droughts and floods, combined with the feeling of the vastness of the Australian landscape, the red soil, primarily flat landscape, huge brilliant blue skies, and hot, dry conditions are in stark contrast to coastal Australia. Water, cliffs, coastal bush and forest. The same vastness, solitude, and drama but a different energy.
"Growing up in and around these places has had a lasting effect on my creative psyche. These experiences have shaped who I am and, therefore, my art."
When it comes to my studio work, my artwork is constantly evolving, inspired by the different landscapes I interact with and observe. Generally, I have seen or remembered something that triggers an idea for a painting. I make sketches and use these as a starting point for my paintings. From the first mark on the canvas, a painting takes on a life of its own and demand certain things - one brush stroke leads to the next until it reaches a kind of, but not entire, equilibrium.
My work ranges from small to large-scale, primarily in oil on canvas. I am also passionate about creating contemporary watercolours combining watercolour markers, watercolour pencils, gouache and pigment ink.
I am now preparing a new series of work that is a departure in style and theme, still about the landscape.
The impressionists and the formal language of modernism and colour theory influence my work. The work is imbued with a sense of reflection and an intimacy with the landscape.
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