Alia Leadabrand lived all around Australia and a little overseas with traveling musical parents until settling in Perth when she was eight. At the age of 18, she started travelling on her own, painting with incredible artists in Toronto, Tokyo and throughout Asia, exhibiting with groups and going solo.
Like all children, she loved drawing and painting. She never grew out of it because it was a compulsion. She realized that being a painter is an isolating and sometimes expensive career, but she also could not imagine another life for herself.
She is a figurative hyperrealist morphing into a figurative surrealist, but she also likes to hope that her style is evolving into something even more individual. She has an intense relationship with color and layers, which she also considers an immense technical challenge and her way of portraying the hidden nature of people’s true selves.
She is influenced by color and scents, by music and talk, by all the sensory experiences of human interaction and creation. She works with oils, but also uses photography and Photoshop to help create her images before painting them. Her exhibition, titled “Durian”, is more multimedia. It is essentially painting and sculpture combined in which she employs the skills of local Balinese carver Wayan Kopi to continue the patterns of the painting into the durian wood frames.
Her works usually are an effort to capture a metaphor of the self within and under the layers of presence, outer distractions and the chaos of the outer world. She think humans are all throwing themselves up against invisible walls in an effort to be authentic, and she would love for this concept to be read through her works. In a nutshell, she paints about people.
Like all children, she loved drawing and painting. She never grew out of it because it was a compulsion. She realized that being a painter is an isolating and sometimes expensive career, but she also could not imagine another life for herself.
She is a figurative hyperrealist morphing into a figurative surrealist, but she also likes to hope that her style is evolving into something even more individual. She has an intense relationship with color and layers, which she also considers an immense technical challenge and her way of portraying the hidden nature of people’s true selves.
She is influenced by color and scents, by music and talk, by all the sensory experiences of human interaction and creation. She works with oils, but also uses photography and Photoshop to help create her images before painting them. Her exhibition, titled “Durian”, is more multimedia. It is essentially painting and sculpture combined in which she employs the skills of local Balinese carver Wayan Kopi to continue the patterns of the painting into the durian wood frames.
Her works usually are an effort to capture a metaphor of the self within and under the layers of presence, outer distractions and the chaos of the outer world. She think humans are all throwing themselves up against invisible walls in an effort to be authentic, and she would love for this concept to be read through her works. In a nutshell, she paints about people.
Featured in The Beat Bali magazine issue #369. Read it online through www.beatmag.com/bali.