Capture

Libby Wakefield is a prize-winning landscape painter and teacher living and working on Gundungurra Country in New South Wales. Working both in her studio and en plein air, she seeks to translate her intimate connection to the local rivers and wetlands into paintings that balance observation with reverie.

Her practice is steeped in Romanticism, exploring beauty and the sublime in the waterways she knows best. “I want to expand on this concept and apply that framework with a new curiosity,” she explains, “looking specifically at the wetlands within my local environment— places that are part of my daily practice, but in many ways unknown and at times unseen.”

In works such as ‘Natti Creek’, where two dark poplars rise through mist against a diffused, peach-grey sky, Wakefield captures the tension between clarity and obscurity, the seen and unseen. Her gentle brushwork and translucent glazes allow each surface of water, each shifting bank, to emerge as if through memory. The landscapes appear at once real and imagined—steadfast in her world yet edged with change.

The round composition of ‘Kangaloon I’, with its billowing clouds and low-slung wetlands, distils her fascination with light and atmosphere, while ‘River and Rain’ submerges trees and shoreline in a soft blur.

Wakefield’s work has been recognised in several key Australian prizes, including the Salon des Refusés, the Paddington Art Prize, the Heysen Prize for Landscape, the Waverley Art Prize, the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, the Wingecarribee Landscape Prize and the David Turnbull Bequest Prize. She has been highly commended in the Norvill Art Prize and the Belle Property Prize, and was a semi-finalist in both the NSW Parliament Plein Air Painting Prize and the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize, where her work was acquired by the Historic Houses Trust. In 2020, she was awarded the Blue Square Art Prize.