Dr Salwa Woodroffe started painting from an early age and kept practicing it through her university studies and her academic carrier in medical microbiology. Since the year 2000, she has become a fulltime artist and taken courses in painting at TAFE, Sydney School of Art, and many other painting workshops. During the last 20 years after regularly painting the Australian landscape outdoors, Salwa has developed her unique style emphasizing the interplay of light and shadow on the landscape. She uses both oil or acrylic media applied by a combination of brushes and palette knives creating an impressionistic style texture of thick against smooth paint and vibrant-bright against dark colours. There is always a focal point in her paintings that communicate with the viewer the magic in the landscape that stopped her in her track, drawing her to paint that subject. The results are paintings that look great from close or far away and makes one feels the emotion of being in the landscape, walking through it and responding to its beauty, whether it be a coastline with dramatic turning sunlit waves, ragged sunburnt landscape of the Flinders ranges, a stormy/foggy day on the valley or a fun sunny day of children playing on the beach.
Salwa regularly experiments with many different techniques that can express to the viewer her feeling to the subject and hence her paintings have their own story to tell and change accordingly.
Salwa has received many awards for her painting and was a finalist in various national award competitions. In 2016 she was elected an associate member of the prestigious Royal Art Society of Sydney. Salwa has contributed to ten different articles about her painting style in the Australia Artist magazine, featured in the International Contemporary Artists book 2014 edition, and has taken part in many solo and combined art exhibitions. Many of her paintings are in private collections in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand.
Website website www.salwawoodroffe.com