Leisl Baker, Another Day in the Sun, The Corner Store Gallery.
Leisl Baker - Familiar Ground
Exhibition Dates: August 27th - September 6th
Online Sales Launch: 7pm August 24th
Business Hours: Wed - Fri 10am-4pm, Sat 10am-2pm
Leisl Baker is a Toowoomba-based contemporary painter celebrated for her expressive landscape and still life artworks. Working primarily in oils, Leisl captures fleeting moments in time as vivid visual snapshots, using a spontaneous, energetic, and intuitive painting style. Her process is both physical and deliberate: she applies thick layers of oil paint to board, then works wet-on-wet to convey the ever-changing light, atmosphere, and energy of a place.
Leisl has been recognised nationally as a finalist in many of Australia’s most prestigious landscape art prizes, including the Hadley’s Prize for Landscape, the Paddington Art Prize (multiple times), the Waverley Art Award, the Pro Hart Outback Art Award, and the Clayton Utz Art Prize. Her work was also featured in the acclaimed Thames & Hudson publication A Painted Landscape (2018) by Amber Creswell Bell, which showcased 50 leading Australian landscape painters.
Leisl Baker, High Country Greens, The Corner Store Gallery.
To me, there’s nothing better than being immersed in a beautiful landscape, and especially, painting it. The process of observing, through all the senses, without analysis and conscious thought, leaves me free to transfer raw perception straight onto a board.
The constant change of light and the conditions seem to recommend a kind of painted shorthand to me. As a result, I work both quickly and deliberately. My aim is to identify and record the major elements that make a scene or place what it is… both how it looks and how it feels.
An important part of my practice is to work frequently en plein air, where the experience is most sensory and where memories are embedded. Larger works and further exploration then happens back in my studio, where I try to distil the key elements of a place even more.
I think my ultimate goal is to create work that can evoke a fond memory of a time or place, perhaps a longing, or a feeling of actually being in the landscape. If that happens, I will have succeeded in capturing some of that mystery beyond the visual.
Leisl Baker, Feels Like Home, The Corner Store Gallery.
Leisl Baker, The Bottom Paddock, The Corner Store Gallery.