To achieve the affect of her flourishing paintings, Maznah Ahmad seems to call upon some deeper notion of the elements. The collage-like texture of her work jumps from the wall. Using mixed media, dyes and paints, her abstract art stretches across the canvas, an eruption of color, freckled and scribbled designs, reminiscent of stained silk, the ocean floor, or a universe full of vast, red stars. Born in Singapore to Indonesian-Malaysian immigrants, her rich background informs her work to the extent that her art becomes the telling of it.

Currently residing in Australia and working on her doctoral research in fine art, she is far from her family, but still carries out tradition in her art by questioning that which she has inherited and what she owns; she struggles also to find a balance between Western and Eastern philosophies. The process of painting, to Ahmad, is a metaphysical journey. She possesses, and hence produces, a sensory knowledge that far surpasses our expectations. Representing the texture of her heritage, and the inner world the self inhabits, Ahmad eases the viewer into a landscape of abstraction with substance – the result of which is poetry.

Ji Chen’s sea- and land-scapes are founded on an epic, musical tension between calm, distant horizons and broad, dramatic movement in the foreground. The Chinese-Australian artist cites the inspirational role of his childrens’ piano playing on his form, perhaps accounting for his rhythmic composition that relies on the harmony between the constituent elements in his works. Ji Chen’s dusty landscapes muster desert dryness through moody, swirling skies and scraggly, weeping formations of red and yellow rock, while his seascapes juxtapose monochromatic horizons with thrilling foregrounds amass with churning, colliding swaths of blues, reds, whites and grays. 

In combining these diametrically opposed styles of application Ji Chen also articulates a personal journey, the contrast between the traditional values he brought from China to his new home in Australia. Beyond the change in cultures, the experience of Australia’s unique and harsh landscape is evident in all Ji Chen’s work. He renders nature with an eye for the sublime, as something simultaneously beautiful and potentially violent.

Taking inspiration from her surroundings' landscapes, Australian painter Lisa Dalla Rosa creates sensuous topographies with a mix of acrylics, inks and other media. Existing outside specific geographic contexts and scales, her compositions evoke microclimates: the two-dimensional spaces call to mind misty dew-soaked hills, meagerly irrigated desert outposts, blistering heat waves and calming watering hole oasis. Yet Dalla Rosa's paintings aren't exactly landscapes, working on a more abstracted, expressive level. She evokes heat and humidity as much through representation as with the connotations of color and texture.

Manipulating paints and inks, Dalla Rosa's surfaces crackle with fissures that suggest heat and dryness, or seem washed over with the glimmering green and blue veneer of deep, soothing tropical waters. From these geological departure points, she uses the universal lexicon of nature to create moodscapes where brilliant yellow expanses can evoke youthful ambition and deep purple ravines suggest brooding melancholy. Revealing her local landscape to international art audiences, Dalla Rosa mines nature's universal expressiveness that speaks across languages and borders.

Australian wildlife painter Ross Franzi’s formative experiences are nearly as complexly layered as his hyperrealist pastorals. His father, a professional photographer, and art teacher Vikki Harvey cultivated his multifaceted understanding of art, reflected in the composition and style of Franzi’s paintings of animals in wild and farmland settings. After suffering an injury in the Royal Australian Air Force he turned to art for its therapeutic benefits, a gift he now shares with his art students.

Franzi’s ability to teach and aid understanding is implicitly present in each of his works, which train viewers’ eyes to different ways of seeing and looking at nature. He creates a visual vocabulary with meticulous, lushly colorful symbols, sceneries and characters rendered with a mix of acrylic and gouache paints. The resulting aesthetic nears magical realism, revealing a delicate, fleeting field of beings, activities and objects parallel to our own. Franzi’s environmentalism pervades his rural wildlife scenes, imbuing his sensibility for nature’s subtleties with an endearing sense of community.

Leni Kae's rhythmic swirls of concentrated color explore human psychology as revealed through aesthetics. However, her artistic prowess is evident not only in her ability to adeptly mix shimmering shades of pigment, but in her dexterity in handling line and shape.The artist's richly hued oils on canvas attempt to examine the human mind's attraction toward and preference for certain colors and in doing so, merge Kae's understanding of the complex science of color with her unmistakable eye for design.   The powerful effects of color, which can enhance and alter moods, trigger hormonal reactions, and awaken dormant memories, are vital to Kae's dually artistic and scientific mission. Therefore, although each painting is undoubtedly a beauty to behold, it is also a continuing experiment in color science, constantly interacting with new viewers, eliciting emotions, choices, and preferences.  

The child of a master mathematician, Leni Kae naturally discovered the unbreakable link between art and science.  As a trained color therapist and artist, Leni Kae lives and works in Australia and exhibits internationally.  

Ruth le Cheminant's lively abstract acrylic paintings on canvas engage the eye with their vivacious energy and powerful colors.  Incorporating an international palette of influences to her stylistically sophisticated works, le Cheminant draws on the work of diverse cultural groups including Asian, Oceanic and contemporary Aboriginal art. Le Cheminant employs a free and confident brush stroke whose movement possesses an almost musical quality, as brilliant hues dance across the canvas in a harmonious symphony of color, texture, and abstract form.  The eye, in turn, follows this enticing rhythmic movement, continually enthralled and entertained by each beautiful work of art. As a result, le Cheminant's paintings call to the emotions, lifting the spirits, and for a moment, transporting the viewer to a world enrobed in pure aesthetic wonder.

Born in Australia, Ruth le Cheminant holds a graduate degree in painting from the University of New South Wales.  The subject of numerous favorable reviews, the artist exhibits her paintings in Sydney and New York.

Sally Smith has a degree and a successful career in architecture, and so one should not be surprised to find within her art a major play of vertical and horizontal lines.  But only a simple artist or architect would be locked in to an unremittingly straightforward use of such essential components; Smith is not so simple.  Similarly, Smith employs a mixture of her English colonial heritage and her husband's Maori ethnicity in her artistic creations, yielding something with both clear foundations and unexpected results.  In her watercolors and ink drawings one sometimes gets the feeling of beholding aboriginal iconography rendered in the style of 17th-century Occidental cartography.  It is a marriage of the "old" and "new" worlds in which there are no Imperialistic clashes, just a peaceful synthesis of culture and style.

Smith resides on Waiheke, a small New Zealand island.  She regularly exhibits in group shows, as well as being featured in an annual solo show that sells out each year.

Tineke Wilde adeptly renders human figure in her quietly spiritual works of sculpture. Her ceramic figures as well as her paintings possess a tactile, human quality and soulfulness that results from their purposeful imperfection. As she models both clay and paint, the artist deliberately allows surfaces to remain uneven, as she believes these perceived flaws enhance each work’s emotional value and emotive qualities. Although Wilde chooses subject matter relating directly to her everyday life and draws inspiration from the domestic sphere, the majority of her body of work carries an underlying theme around freedom and choice. With an interest in mythology and women’s issues, Tineke Wilde utilizes goddess figures, like the Egyptian deity Bast to address the concepts of motherhood, birth, and familial relationships. 

Born in the Netherlands,  Wilde immigrated to New Zealand in 1981.  She now lives and works near Auckland.