When Lise Temple moved to the Barossa Valley in South Australia she was mesmerised by the broad views of the country’s never ending valleys.
The landscape painter says that the light almost "feels more vivid there". There must be something quite spectacular about the warm sun illuminating the grasslands of the Barossa. These broad landscapes have, in turn, broadened the scope of her art career, inspiring her to develop an innovative (and frankly gorgeous!) method of abstraction.
Image: Detail of Tree Lines + Distant Hills (125cm x 71cm) oil on canvas.
Lise, like many artists, has worked hard to reach the point in which she is able to spend most of her time painting. She started a degree at art school in her late teens but soon decided it wasn’t for her, “I dropped out, frustrated that my questions weren’t being answered and thinking I should get a real job." Luckily, it didn’t take her long to find a new community of like-minded creatives to bounce ideas off. Lise spoke about how this community support grounded her when she began painting again.
“A group of generous artists in a shared studio encouraged me to work and learn with them and I ended up doing an informal apprenticeship there. I met my partner Roland Weight at this time. He is also an artist, and an experienced teacher. I rely a lot on our critical interaction during the process of art making and feel very lucky to have someone to bounce creative ideas off when I hit a brick wall!”
Image: Lise's studio.
Lise’s carefully packaged paintings arrived at the gallery earlier this month. Unboxing them felt exciting, like unwrapping a gift on your birthday. The quality of the thick oil paint she uses is even more lustrous in real life. Lise's paintings are simultaneously dynamic and subtle, just one confident stroke of paint can capture the delineation of a mountain and a few delicate marks allude to the existence of a canola field or distant wattle trees. The tension between her more representational details and abstract pains of colour draws us in and keeps us engaged. We can't stop looking at these beautiful paintings.
Image: The Road In (64cm x 54cm) oil on canvas.
Lise loves the immediacy of oil paint and builds up textural plains of colour using her collection of indispensable palette knives. She walked us through her process and spoke about how she uses photography and collage techniques to create her landscape compositions:
“I generally begin by shooting hundreds of photos from the car whenever I’m a passenger. These photos become the source for collage making, which is how I compose my designs. Once I have a composition I like, I use it as a maquette for a painting. The painting process is quite loose with further developments to the design always occurring in the studio. I like to allow for accidents to play a part and will sometimes make several different paintings from the same collage with the resulting works ending up quite different.”
Image: Autumn Vines (64cm x 54cm) oil on canvas.
Lise’s an award-winning contemporary artist. We're thrilled to welcome her and her remarkable paintings to Forman. A few of her standout achievements are as follows:
Winner – City of Burnside Prize 2013.
Winner – Watershed Art Prize 2013.
Winner – Clare Art Prize 2011.
Winner – Barossa Art Prize 2011.
Winner – Best Regional Artist – Heysen Prize for Australian Landscape 2007.
Winner – Heysen Prize for Australian Landscape 2005.
Shop Lise's collection here.