Louise Isackson

LOUISE ISACKSON | VISUAL ARTIST
b. Sydney, Australia.
Lives and works in Brisbane, QLD Australia
B.A. Fine Arts; QCA, Griffith University. 1992
Masters of Creative Industries (M.C.I) QUT. Kelvin Grove. 2016

Hello Art Lovers, I am an expressionist painter, exploring brush work, colour and painterly processes of art-making. I’d say my practice is hovering between abstraction and realism. Sometimes I’m compelled to paint something real, while other times I enjoy the freedom of a loose simply mark-making approach. My process is the impact of applying paint in rhythmic brush stokes forming a rich surface of pattern, organic lines and interweaving blocks of flat coloured shapes.

I have a keen interest in the musicality of colour, and explore this constantly as I’m painting. Mostly the sound/colour experiments are present in the blurry sonic circles series. Kandinski’s ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ is my studio handbook, and his philosophies on colour and art making is always an inspiration.

My preferred medium is oil paint with wax and a variety of glazing mediums. Painting in this way truly feels like meditation, making the brush strokes shimmer, defining the forms through layers of paint. Brush stokes feel like heartbeats. My paintings are intuitive and painterly, yet the designer in me forces decisions of graphic contrast, such as the risk of what remains in the process. I’m constantly negotiating contrasts, extracting the right combination of colour, scale, pattern and rhythmic form.

Strangely, painting for me is more about trust. Simply enabling the paint to show me the way is everything. Paint now, think later is my daily mantra, in the studio. I like to experiment with painting realism verging on abstraction or vice versa. Like preparing for excavation into unseen beauty, with a search that begins on the tip of the brush.

CAREER BACKGROUND
Louise began her art career by completing a Fine Arts degree at Griffith University in the ’90s. She showed her work in exhibitions with many local galleries based on her visual art studies before taking up a career in the corporate world of design and advertising. True to a renaissance person, Louise also moonlighted as a performing Jazz Singer and performed in Japan and New York. Completing her QUT masters thesis in Creative Industries in 2016 marked her departure from the IT world into a full-time dedication as a visual artist.