Strelitzia

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Creating art has been a long journey for Liana, and like many artists, a business career became her focus for many years. She dove back full time into art 20 years ago, teaching primary and high school art for 10 years, while creating her own pieces in her studio. Liana experiments with any and every medium she can get her hands on, including all wet and dry acrylic and watercolour mediums and alcohol inks. Whatever the medium, Liana’s pieces are detailed, multilayered and complex. Her method is to allow images to develop organically – an initial idea becomes something entirely different in the finished piece. She uses media in unconventional ways, juxtaposing contrasting mediums and colour, glazing and layering, allowing feeling and emotion to drive the final work.

For the past few years, she’s settled in to creating highly textural, slightly abstract, mixed media paintings focusing on nature – flora and fauna – and their respective complexities existing in our human dominated world. What lies beneath is at play in these paintings. The paintings aren’t always as simple as they seem. Upon closer look, there are opposing colours under several layers of paint. There are hand-dyed papers in collage techniques. Mediums create the impression of bricks or netting, or just an organic undulation. Swirls and patterns appear where they don't seem to belong. Examining a leaf up close reveals intricate designs that aren’t visible from a distance. Instead of a branch, a barbed wire appears in its place. Liana’s primary surface of choice is wood panel, which is conducive to the onslaught of mediums, stripping, painting and sanding required until a desired result is achieved.