Exhibition Three

Susan Buret | Leo Robba

Susan Buret | Painting | Master of Philosophy

I began a life long love affair with pattern when I first visited the buildings and gardens of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain in 1975. I paint to make visible the delights of my engagement with pattern and light. However, I am intrigued by what it is about pattern that we find so engaging and how we use it in daily life. Deciding that two-dimensional paintings of pattern were inadequate to explore these interests, I wanted to employ new means of pictorial expression. In my research project I set out to investigate what happens when painted pattern is released from the rectilinear confines of traditional painting.

Susan Buret is lives and works in Burrawang in the Southern Highlands. Buret is fascinated by geometric patterning in art, architecture and the domestic environment. She employs painting and embroidery to produce pattern-based works informed by her ephemeral experiences of colour and light in architectural settings and in her garden.

Leo Robba, Big Autumn (detail), 2013, 138cm x 360cm, oil on canvase, Photographer: Paul Wright

Leo Robba | Painting | Doctor of Philosophy

The painting Big Autumn (2013) is part of a larger body of work that explores the artist’s garden tradition and many of the formal aspects and distinctive features of garden culture. Like gardens this painting pictures time, not just the colouring of leaves and the turn of a season but also the camellias in flower and spring bulbs beginning to sprout. Its outward appearance depicts an idealised version of the view outside my studio in the Blue Mountains but its main narrative is an expression of re-imagined nature garden culture and a humanised landscape

Born in 1962 in Bundaberg, Queensland Leo Robba is a landscape painter who graduating from the Queensland College of Art in 1982. Since moving to Sydney in 1983 he has held over thirty-five solo exhibitions in Australia and New Zealand and has taken part in numerous group exhibitions both here and internationally. Leo has a Masters of Fine Art from Newcastle University exploring the topic Regionalism in Australian Landscape Painting and his recent PhD research topic at the ANU, Canberra, is “The Artist’s Garden: Humanising the Landscape.” His artwork is represented in many private and public collections, including Maitland Regional Gallery, Brisbane City Hall Gallery, New England Region Art Gallery and Museum, Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery and the University of Newcastle, Blue Mountains Cultural Centre and Bundanon Collection. He is represented by King Street Gallery on William, Sydney and lives and works in Springwood, in the Blue Mountains.