OIL PAINTINGS BY SERIES
Melani du Jardin is an Australian painter, draftswoman, ceramicist and photographer whose practice has developed across nearly five decades of drawing and painting and nine years of tertiary study across multiple arts disciplines.
Rooted in the Romantic and Impressionist traditions, her painting combines strong draughtsmanship with layered oil techniques, glazing, gestural mark-making and abstraction. Landscape is central to her practice, particularly the wild mountains, waterways and subtropical environments of eastern Australia, although her extensive body of work also encompasses portraiture, the figure, birds, photography and psychologically driven drawing and assemblage.
Her work frequently emerges from lived experience. Landscape, memory, relationship, loss, survival and psychological inquiry become intertwined, with art functioning not only as representation but as a way of thinking, recording and making meaning.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY SERIES
Melani du Jardin gained degree qualifications in photography before training as a fine art romantic impressionist painter. Whilst she never paints from a photograph, staging photographic images still plays a large role in how she documents and interprets the world around her. Often, her photographic work will interplay with her painted works and the series themes can often overlap. The artist enjoys capturing pattern, light, reflection and mood in her imagery as well as capturing flowers, something she has done since she was a small child.
CERAMICS BY SERIES
Melani du Jardin has been hand building ceramic forms since she was a young girl, having first acquired the skills from her maternal Grandmother at her studio on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia. Melani's ceramics are held in collections in Australia, USA and Spain.
JUICE
THE
BERRY