The Work + The Artist
Since I first picked up a pencil as a small child, I have always been drawing.
Charlene Walker is an Australian artist based in Sydney. She put herself through art school while working as a graphic designer. She studied Fine Arts at St. George TAFE and later received a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts from the College of Fine Arts (COFA), UNSW Sydney. She has also undertaken a number of short courses across a range of media, extending her technical knowledge and material experimentation.
Alongside her fine art studies, Walker built a successful career as a graphic designer, art director, and illustrator, later working as a creative director within her own design agency and web hosting company. Her art practice has remained central to her creative life and is now the primary focus of her work, bringing together her formal training, professional experience, and long-standing commitment to painting.
As a student, Walker was a finalist in the Telecom Art Scholarship Award at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery and received the TAFE Student Medal Award (runner-up) at TAFE St. George.
Walker has since been a finalist in numerous Australian art prizes, including the Greenway Art Prize (Open Section), Little Things Art Prize at Saint Cloche Gallery, Lethbridge 20,000, Northern Beaches Gallery Art Prize (Summer), and the Glebe Art Prize. She has exhibited in a range of group exhibitions and received a commission for a site-specific artwork for EDGE Ashfield Sound, Bytes Festival.
ARTIST STATEMENT
"Exploring the beauty and depth of the Australian landscape, I hope to imbue my art with a reflective intimacy, a deeply personal reaction to my environment. I strive to create an internal world, an internal logic, within each piece. In drawing and painting I hope to uncover the undiscovered within the work."
My contemporary painting practice is grounded in a deep engagement
with landscape, approached not as a fixed subject but as a lived,
evolving experience.
I believe the Australian landscape, whether we're considering the expansive outback or the diverse coastal regions, deeply influences our collective mindset, shaping how we think and see the world.
My connection to the landscape stems from growing up in a bush-encompassed Sydney suburb, spending childhood holidays in central west NSW with my mother's family on a farming property, and moving there to spend my middle years. I then spent my later teenage years to adulthood spending long periods on the rocky headlands and coastal forests of South Coast NSW.
Painting is central to how I think and work. More than a technical skill, it is a complex, intuitive process — one that allows personal expression to align with contemporary visual language. My work prioritises exploration, presence, and the physical experience of making, with each painting developing its own internal logic over time.
My process often begins with sketches when I am out, and then back in my studio are loosely translated onto canvas. From there, the final form of the painting is rarely predetermined. The work evolves organically as I respond to colour, surface, and movement, allowing the painting to arrive at its own resolution. This openness to uncertainty is where much of the joy in my practice lies.
Colour plays a central role in my work. I rarely plan a palette in advance; colours often exist intuitively before they emerge through the act of painting. I work instinctively, placing strong colours in tension with one another to establish mood and atmosphere. Recent works, including the road-trip paintings, use darker tonal ranges that contrast with the luminosity of my moon and crystal-based works, creating a dialogue across bodies of work.
Narrative in my paintings is subtle rather than literal. The works draw from journeys through the Australian countryside, observations, and daily encounters closer to home — particularly along the Cooks River in Sydney. These experiences become vehicles for exploring form, composition, and emotional resonance rather than direct depiction.
At the core of my practice is a sustained curiosity — a commitment to discovery, experimentation, and attentiveness. My paintings invite the viewer into a space shaped by movement, memory, and colour, where landscape becomes both external terrain and internal reflection.
Just some of my influences are Richard Dieborn, Rothco, Colin Lanceley, Francis Bacon, French Impressionism, Modernism and Meiji woodblocks.