Exhibition Dates: August 27th - September 6th
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.
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.
