About

My paintings explore the space between memory and landscape.

Working from botanical forms gathered through observation, photography and recollection, I build layered compositions that exist between abstraction and representation. Rather than describing a specific place, the paintings evoke the experience of moving through it—where fragments of foliage, shifting light and remembered forms overlap to create landscapes reconstructed through memory.

Native botanical forms become a visual language through which I explore memory, place and our evolving relationship with the Australian landscape. While rooted in observation, the paintings are not intended as literal depictions of nature. Instead, they invite viewers into atmospheric spaces where familiar forms dissolve, reappear and quietly suggest the rhythms of the natural world.

Transparency lies at the heart of my process. Working across acrylic and oil, I build each painting through successive translucent layers that allow earlier decisions to remain visible. Rather than concealing what came before, each layer contributes to the history of the work, creating a sense of depth that is both physical and emotional. The finished paintings become accumulations of moments, observations and traces held together within a single surface.

Before returning to painting, I worked as a graphic designer in advertising, fashion and textile design. That background continues to inform my understanding of composition, colour and balance, while painting provides space for intuition, experimentation and discovery. Each work evolves slowly through layering, revision and careful observation, and each painting contributes to the visual language of the next, allowing a body of work to develop as an ongoing conversation rather than a series of isolated images.

Ultimately, my practice is an exploration of light, memory and ecological connection—an invitation to pause and inhabit a space where abstraction and nature quietly converge.

ESSAYS

A Subtle Luminosity of Colour

Sarah Leslie’s paintings are imbued with a subtle luminosity of colour which combines with an engaging sense of form to entice the eye into realms of gentle pleasure. Her colours are light and bright, expressing an optimism picked up in the rhythmic interplay of organic shapes, circles and ovoids. Beguiled by the initial impression of simplicity, transparent forms and overlapping colours provide a visual complexity to captivate the eye and mind, and set them on their journey of enquiry. Paint raining down the surfaces of her paintings increases both their flatness and their sense of the third dimension, creating an ambiguous sense of space and movement, again playing lightly with visual paradoxes.
Botanic forms of branches, leaves and buds, are derived from childhood memories of printed fabrics from the 1960s and contemporary experiences. Leslie, however, is equally in the thrall of nature, the transcience of the seasons and atmospheric moments are caught in her web, as the transparent veils of colour imitate ‘the play of natural light on the botanic forms’, as she describes it. The idea is developed differently in each of her works, the matt surface giving way to the glossy, super smooth, the colours shot through windows, the momentary is held within the structure of her design.
Design is the strongest element in her work, as to be expected, for Leslie graduated from Monash University in Graphic Design. Much of her initial experimentation and design is completed on her computer, a medium of which she has great command. While it permeates, it does not dominate her painterly exploration of the complexities of illusionistic space, rhythmic movement, and the visual delight of colour and texture. Her work has much to offer in maturity of style combined with a ready command of colour and design, her paintings full of an assurance that one associates with an experienced painter.

David Thomas, Melbourne

If you would like to get in touch, please email: sarah@sarahleslieart.com