Lucinda Leveille on Bonsai, Silence and a Gum Tree Lost to Cyclone Alfred

Australian painter Lucinda Leveille, who trained for five years at the National Art School in Sydney, is developing an unnamed series of one-metre-square monochromatic canvases inspired by East Asian art and the shapes and rhythms of bonsai trees. The series grew out of The Art of Stillness, a painting she cites as most representative of her current practice, with its East Asian-influenced composition and deliberate use of space. Leveille works from a studio in the Gold Coast hinterland, starting at five in the morning and painting nearly seven days a week, a discipline she traces to an anecdote about Brett Whiteley, whom she briefly encountered as a student. Her earlier Colours of Silence series asked how little could be placed on a canvas while still communicating. A gum tree outside her studio, long a reference point and the seed of the Above The Canopy series, was destroyed overnight by Cyclone Alfred, after which solitary trees became central to her compositions. Shortly after graduating, a gallery owner told her she had no talent, and she largely stopped painting for almost a decade. A request from students to teach watercolour, a medium she barely knew, later opened explorations of mixed media, inks and water-soluble charcoals.