‘untitled’ Painting

Gayle Stockley has lived and studied art in Perth, Melbourne and Canberra, in 1993 settling in Wamboin (outside Canberra) where she has a studio. She also spends time at Wapengo (south coast NSW). “I trained as a painter but have been drawn to the direct working processes of drawing and hands-on physicality of sculpture”. For the period 2008-2015 Gayle used bushfire-blackened casuarina ‘sticks’ to construct simple, geometric, relief sculpture. From 2015, on returning to oil painting her work has developed an abstract, minimalist style. Acrylic or oil paint is applied with either brush or palette knife on canvas, sometimes using canvas collage on un-stretched canvas. Her colour, line and form are drawn from a life-long observation of nature, however Gayle has been greatly influenced by seeing the work of Ellsworth Kelly, Brancusi and other much-admired artist’s work in New York in 2019. Gayle has exhibited work at several regional galleries in NSW and Victoria, exhibited at Sculpture Bermagui, won the Goulburn Regional Art Prize in 2009 and was a finalist in the 2022 42nd Alice Prize, National Contemporary Art Award.