SAMANTHA GROENESTYN
Continental Breakfast
Oil on linen 107 x 37cm
A meditation on my place between two continents: what I’ve inherited from my Dutch ancestors, what I bring into the country of my birth.
Art history leans on symbolism, and I play on its addictive transcendent pull, making your eyes continually ascend and descend the seductive sinuous lines. But the real interest takes place in the wide, horizontal plane of immanence: the broad unfolding spread of sensation. Waxy living plants wind their way through the sumptuous textures of studio treasures, growing unpredictably even as I paint. I respond and discover, I gently rein my subjects in.
Raised in far north Queensland, Groenestyn trained as a philosopher and painter in Brisbane and Vienna. She is a 2024 finalist in the Archibald Salon des Refuses, the Percival Portrait Painting Award and the Clayton Utz Award, among others. Her work is observational but tightly constructed, anchored in vital, rhythmic drawing.
Art history leans on symbolism, and I play on its addictive transcendent pull, making your eyes continually ascend and descend the seductive sinuous lines. But the real interest takes place in the wide, horizontal plane of immanence: the broad unfolding spread of sensation. Waxy living plants wind their way through the sumptuous textures of studio treasures, growing unpredictably even as I paint. I respond and discover, I gently rein my subjects in.
Raised in far north Queensland, Groenestyn trained as a philosopher and painter in Brisbane and Vienna. She is a 2024 finalist in the Archibald Salon des Refuses, the Percival Portrait Painting Award and the Clayton Utz Award, among others. Her work is observational but tightly constructed, anchored in vital, rhythmic drawing.