Lee Panizza

Lee Panizza is a painter concerned with abstraction from nature and the nature of abstraction. Born and educated in South Australia, Lee creates semi-representational paintings that reflect her interest in light and how movement manifests in nature. She captures the subtle to seismic shifts in our environment, from the interaction of colours on leaves and plant life, the sky bursting through negative space, to the gentle sway of branches.

Lee Panizza's Early Career

Lee has a degree in Fine Art Painting from the South Australian School of Art, Adelaide, South Australia. For nearly 30 years, she painted and farmed in rural Portugal, surrounded by cork, olive, pine and eucalyptus groves. Much of her work, particularly the series Flickers, is a legacy of this experience and passion for the natural world.

Style and Approach

Through the medium of oil paint, Lee explores the philosophical questions of knowledge, certainty, definition and memory. Harnessing the inherent structures found in nature and a clever interplay of light and shadow, she constructs a beautiful aesthetic of disintegration and reinvention. Rhythmic patterns emerge from fragmented sheets of colour that glide over each other, while a sense of time surfaces through shifting layers of paint and geometric impositions.

Inspiration and Exhibitions

Lee classes Bauhaus, Josef Albers, Mondrian, Jasper Johns, Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, Mel Bochner, Paul Cezanne, Gaugin, and Vermeer among her biggest stylistic influences. The semi-abstract painter has exhibited in England, Italy, Spain and beyond. Lee now works from her studio in Cornwall, UK.