Focus on Samantha dennison

Samantha Dennison’s still life paintings are people stories. Details from the everyday. Her landscapes are travel companions, a necessary, calming ‘elixir’ drawn from Australia’s unique terrain . There’s a circularity to her creativity.

Photos: Bo Wong

Paint and clay - from childhood, to now. A yearning for calm and contemplation.

Women artists - grandmother, a China painter. Mother, Rosemary Mostyn a respected printmaker. Rosemary’s godmother, the renowned watercolourist and China painter, Flora Landells – all paved her way.

Her young family moved from the Perth Hills to Albany in Western Australia’s south. The bush was different.

‘I would knock on my new neighbour’s doors, and ‘thieve’ (she jokes) sprigs of leaves and flora’.

They were soon heralded in her highly collected still lifes.

Thrift shop treasures discovered on family camping trips became centre-canvas.

Compositions were arranged and painted in a corner cabinet bathed in magnificent natural light.

‘I got to the point where I wanted to pare back the space (on the canvas and around the objects).

Samantha’s inaugural exhibition was landscapes.

Recently she and a group of women artists steered her back to the Pilbara in Australia’s far north-west with its spectacular scenery.

It was an immersion in calm; an opportunity ‘to just be’.

A special memory for Samantha was watching an eagle flying in a thermal overhead - and accidently treading into black clay.

A skerrick was used to ‘imprint’ the ceramic glaze; it was honoured in the still lifes.

It seems odd that initially, Samantha didn’t know what direction she was heading even though she had clarity about the end game.

Five galleries called. It was genuinely too much.

Now she is featured in Australian galleries Linton and Kay Galleries in Western Australia, Flinders Lane, Melbourne, Victoria, and A K Bellinger Gallery, Inverell in New South Wales.

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