Llael McDonald

Llael McDonald, a seasoned artist with over twenty-seven years of experience, paints meditative still-life works that honour the classical genre of vanitas. The pieces that form Savour, her latest solo offering for Michael Reid Southern Highlands, are characterised by their moody and introspective tone.

Llael depicts lusciously formed fruits, flowers, and fine china set before darkened tonal grounds. A Baroque sensibility is achieved through her deft balancing of light and her rigorous commitment to attaining an exact likeness of her subjects. Yet while her works are indebted to a movement that took form centuries ago, they are not maudlin advertisements for the inexorable passage of time. They are bursting with life and rejoice in the quiet, often dramatic beauty of simple things.

There is a filmic, soft-brushed surface quality to Llael’s paintings, achieved by her slow, almost meditative process. One senses that she takes a certain refuge in art-making and its promise of long, uninterrupted periods of focus and attention. She describes her paintings as a celebration of “the power of food to unify,” conjuring the image of a dining table, another ritual that, like painting itself, offers a chance of reprieve from the din and distractions of daily life.

For such compressed and spare compositions, the pieces in Savour continue to offer up new, surprising details to the returning viewer, such that her masses of brushwork harbour small images likely missed at first glance.

Llael’s work appears in collections across Australia and internationally, including in England, France, and the United States. She now works from her studio in the Victorian highlands, where she continues her painting practice.