Rosie's Winter Garden

Framed in a beautiful dark float frame.
This painting is a semi finalist in the 2020 Lester Prize.
This is a texturally rich painting of my mother, who retired last year after a long career primarily caring within disability services. She has long had a love for gardening, and now spends much of her time doing just that. During the isolation period I was concerned about being so far away from her, and the thought of her in the garden felt comforting to me. In this portrait I’ve tried to show her in a moment of quiet contemplation - lost in her thoughts are she tends to the garden. She is someone of great strength, resilience, love, care, nurture, patience, practicality, - qualities shown in her career & as a mother & grandmother. I've used the palette knife a lot in this painting to achieve areas of rich impasto paint.

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Colleen Stapleton is a contemporary realist artist whose work focuses on the figure, portraiture & still life. She has been a finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award, Darling Portrait Prize, Shirley Hannan, Percival, SBS, Lethbridge 20000, Kennedy Art Prize, International Art Renewal Centre Salon & received the Highly Commended Award in the KAAF Prize. Career highlights include winning the 2018 A.M.E Bale Painting prize, Florence Academy of Art Scholarship, and the JAAS Brett Whiteley Scholarship. She has exhibited in group shows nationally and has studied in workshops at the Repin Academy (St Petersburg), Florence Academy of Art, Realist Academy of Art (Toronto), and with Stephen Early from Studio Incamminati. She also has a Bachelor of Fine Art from Griffith University and a Diploma of Art from Julian Ashton Art School.With a passion for figurative oil painting, she paints to try to depict the beauty and complexity of life, objects and scenes.