Bronte Leighton-Dore
Artwork title: The treetops rustle; it is carried down the escarpment and dissipates in the lower fields
Medium: oil on board
Size: 100 × 140 cm
Year: 2026
$8,400
About the Artwork
The study for this work was painted in residence at Bundanon. While there, I worked with Luke de Zilva, exploring the interplay of sound and image in response to the landscape. For this piece, I returned to a location we had encountered together after following a path carved through the scrub by wallabies. I was drawn to the way the trees, grasses and rocks overlapped, and to a subtle, haunting darkness that seemed to linger in the landscape.
About the Artist
Bronte Leighton-Dore (1994) is an artist based in Gadigal Country. Her practice is bound in painting the environments which surround her. Leighton-Dore enjoys traveling to the bush to paint, where she uses gouache on paper to capture smaller ‘en plein air’ works, which are used for larger works in the studio. Leighton-Dore uses bold mark making, colour and space to capture the fleeting moment, inviting the viewer into a vibrant celebration of the present. The paintings hover between figuration and abstraction with light and texture that evokes the landscape rather than describing it. Leighton-Dore graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art from the National Art School in Sydney in 2018. A finalist in Major Art Prizes such as the Wynne Prize (2019, 2021), the Mosman Prize (2020), the Archibald Prize (2025) and the Paddington Art Prize (2019, 2021, 2023), She won the Waverly Art Prize in 2024. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since 2017, including the Melbourne, Sydney and Aotearoa Art Fairs.
Photo: William Robertson