Lesley Dumbrell facts for kids
Lesley Dumbrell, born on 14 October 1941 in Melbourne, Australia, is a famous Australian artist. She is known for her very precise and clear abstract paintings that use geometric shapes. Lesley was also a leader in the Australian Women's Art Movement during the 1970s. She became known as one of the top artists in Melbourne who used international styles like colour field and hard-edged abstraction. Her first big art show, looking back at her whole career, was held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2024.
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Her Education and Teaching
From 1958 to 1962, Lesley Dumbrell studied painting, printmaking, and sculpture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She earned a Diploma of Art in Painting. Later, from 1966 to 1968, she taught art at RMIT. In 1977, she was an Artist in Residence at Monash University. She also taught painting part-time at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne from 1980 to 1985.
How She Creates Art
Lesley Dumbrell has made many important contributions to art in Australia and around the world. She is especially known for her geometric abstraction paintings. These are paintings that use shapes like squares, circles, and triangles in an abstract way.
She was inspired by artists like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. She read Kandinsky's book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, while she was studying. In 1966, she became interested in colour field painting, which uses large areas of flat color. She also explored abstract art and optical art, which creates illusions of movement. She admired the work of artist Bridget Riley. Around this time, Dumbrell started using Liquitex acrylic paints.
Lesley works in a very careful and precise way. She starts by making detailed drawings on paper to plan her artwork. Only after careful planning does she begin painting. For example, her three-part painting called February (1976) took about six months to finish!
Optical Effects in Her Art
Dumbrell uses colors and lines to create amazing optical effects. These often make you think of natural things like wind, fire, rain, and earth. Her paintings can seem to move. For instance, the painting Ripple (1972) shows a wavy effect. Her works Foehn (1975) and Zephyr (1975) show the movement of winds. She said these paintings were about "the movement part of wind, but also the intangibleness of it."
Lesley explained that the optical element in art has always been there. But a group of artists, including her, started to really focus on it. They made it the strongest part of their work. She felt this was a truly new and exciting development in art.
In 1986, her watercolor paintings were shown in the Colour and Transparency exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. In 1990, she moved to Thailand. This added new visual ideas to her artwork. Now, she divides her time between Thailand and Victoria, Australia.
In 1986, Lesley Dumbrell was a special guest artist for the Melbourne Art Trams series. In 2019, she was asked to put her 1986 artwork design on a Melbourne tram again.
Her Role in Women's Art
Lesley Dumbrell was a pioneer in the Australian Women's Art Movement of the 1970s. She has been involved in many activities to support women artists for years. She worked with other artists like Erica McGilchrist, Kiffy Carter, and Meredith Rogers. They helped create networks for women artists in Melbourne. Dumbrell also helped start the Women's Art Register in Australia. This is a very important collection that aims to record and save the artistic work of Australian women. It also helps to support and promote them.
Where Her Art Is Kept
Lesley Dumbrell's artworks are held in major art collections across Australia. These include the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Queensland Art Gallery, National Australia Bank, Federation University Australia, and Artbank.
Art Exhibitions
In 1969, the Bonython Gallery in Sydney held Lesley Dumbrell's first solo exhibition. Her work was shown alongside her husband Lenton Parr, Bryan Westwood, and Don Driver. An art critic named Donald Brook described her "ambiguous abstract figures." He said their soft colors were "surprisingly agreeable" and gentle to the eye.
In 2023, Dumbrell was part of the Melbourne Now exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria.
The exhibition Thrum at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2024 was the first big museum show of Dumbrell's work. This exhibition covered her five-decade career. It showed her unique visual style and how well she uses color, movement, and rhythm in her art.
Lesley Dumbrell has shown her art widely in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Since 1990, she has lived and worked between Thailand and Victoria, Australia.
