Robbi Neal is a best selling award winning artist and author. She lives in Ballarat and trained at the Victorian College of the Arts and on finishing Art School won the Footscray Aquisition Prize twice. In 2020 after regularly exhibiting her work in solo shows, raising 5 children, surviving aggressive cancer and just generally letting life get in the way of her own goals she was able to return to full time to painting and writing.
In 2020 Robbi set up a studio under the carport at her home in Ballarat and began to paint and draw and was in that year a finalist in the Lethbridge Small Scale Art Award. In 2021 she was a finalist in the 66th Blake Prize and in 2022 the Ravenswood Prize for Women Artists.
In 2024 she was a finalist in the prestigious Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing and in 2025 is shortlisted in the Lethbridge Landscape Prize. Her latest book 'With Winter Comes Darkness' won the Daphne Du Maurier Kiss of Death Prize in USA and Canada.
Robbi now has a studio in the back garden surrounded by the flora that works its way into her painting.
Robbi's work explores themes of belonging, memory, and deep connection to Country. Through evocative, layered storytelling, Robbi reflects on place, identity, and the enduring ties between land and spirit and love and community. Her paintings are both personal and universal—offering quiet meditations on home, heritage, and the rhythms of the natural world. Celebrated for their ability to weave narrative and image, Robbi continues to inspire with work that speaks to the heart of connection, belonging and care for Country.
Robbi has mixed racial heritage. She is painfully shy, she says she is a hermit. It has took her a year to put a photo of herself on her Bluethumb profile that shows her face. She has always suffered from depression which she blames on a rotten childhood. Sometimes the more miserable she feels the brighter her paintings get as she believes that looking for joy in small things is where we find god. She says her works are her voice and are landscapes grounded in her grandmother’s Country but are also emotional landscapes about connection and belonging and finding the small things in life that are easy to miss but give our lives true meaning and happiness. Robbi loves to explore different ways of creating art, through works on paper and painting on canvas.
In 2023 Robbi was Bluethumb's 4th top seller.
In 2024 Robbi's fifth book "With Winter Comes Darkness' was published to rave reviews.
Some of Robbi's shortlisting in major prizes:
Lethbridge Landscape Prize, Shortlisted 2025
Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing, Finalist 2024
Lethbridge Small Scale Arts Award, Finalist 2022
Lethbridge Landscape Prize Salon De Refuses` Finalist 2022
Ravenswood Art Prize for Women - Finalist 2022
Footscray Acquisition Prize - Two times winner
Lethbridge Small Scale Art Award - Four times short listed
The 66th Blake Prize - Finalist
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