Leisl is a Brisbane based artist, who has always been captivated by landscape and the natural world, perhaps in part because she grew up on the land. Leisl’s paintings are gestural and instinctive, featuring big, fluid brushstrokes in oil, and sometimes rapid sgraffito. They depict thriving verdant scenes of bucolic abundance, vividly expressing the sense of sanctuary that she finds in these locations.
A spontaneous, energetic and intuitive painter, Leisl is interested in, and inspired by, the personality, character, virtues and story of people and places as much as their beauty. Her work is a compulsion to capture and magnify what she sees as the essence of a subject.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“Overwhelmingly, I’m struck by the beauty, magnificence and benevolence of this world we live in – a mundane cow paddock, a spectacular escarpment or a cliff sheered away at the edge of a frothing ocean – all remind me, in their own ways, of how individually ephemeral, yet collectively eternal all this really is… a permanently impermanent procession of lives that flourish, wither and pass, perfectly imperfect, back into Emily Dickinson’s ‘quiet dust’, from where life springs again. Nowhere does this sentiment speaker louder to me than in country that shows signs of human toil; a stand of old Trees that tell tales of a home that once was, or an old fence line now failing to maintain boundaries that used to matter.

My work is an attempt at capturing some of the sense of awe, loss, hope and comfort that landscape evokes in me. I know I can never capture this complex beauty to its fullest extent, I probably can’t even really paint the feeling or personality of a place, but in dragging a paint-heavy brush across the contours of a hillside, scratching out scrub and branches or letting a watery glaze dribble and merge in its watery way, I feel somehow like I’m paying homage, listening to what it has to say and maybe even expanding a moment of time.”

 – Leisl Mott, 2018.

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