Competitions
Lee Trewartha
Instagram: @lee_trewartha_artist
Website: www.leetrewarthaartist.com
Artwork Title: The Unbroken Will
Artwork Medium: Carbon on 100% rag paper
Year Created: 2025
Artwork Description:
Drawn with the rich, velvety depth of carbon on Magnani 1404 cotton paper, “The Unbroken Will” explores the co-existence of fragility and endurance. The mirrored surface of the river speaks to the duality of life; strength and vulnerability, trial and joy, life and loss, the broken tree that struggles to survive as its environment threatens to envelope it, remains a symbol of defiant resistance in the face of adversity. It is both landscape and a metaphor: an elegy to what survives, and a testament to the will that refuses to fall. Even in isolation, with the threat of being consumed by what surrounds it, there is a fierce desire to remain. “The Unbroken Will” does not shout; it stands, and in that act, speaks everything.
Artist Bio:
Lee Trewartha, is an Artist based in central Victoria - With a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours 1st cls)( Masters upgrade) and Phd (pending). Lee works across oils, mixed media, drawing and assemblage. She has been included as a finalist in major Australian Prizes some including the The Hawkesbury 2025, Blaze prize 2007, Blake Prize Director's Cut 2009, 2011, John Coburn Prize (Blake Society), Tattersalls Landscape Prize, National Tertiary Art Award, and was also awarded the National Gallery of Victoria Trustees Award for artistic excellence, along with major international research scholarships, a European travel grant through Latrobe University, and the Australian Commonwealth Postgraduate Award for both Masters and Doctoral research. Lee has exhibited widely over the past 24 years, both abroad and within Australia.
Lee’s previous large scale monochromatic works and studies revolved around a contemporary interpretation of the 17th century baroque period but after a recent infirmity, her work had to change due to her lowered mobility to smaller scale work and her love for drawing during this time resurfaced. Her works during this time depicted leafy pockets of nature in the form of landscapes, which became a conduit for Lee to immerse herself in quiet solitude, presence and recuperation, which has become her new lifescape.
Her work has evolved to include working on paper using carbon, charcoal and graphite with imagery focusing on the enduring resilience of the natural world that surrounds us and our transient part of it. Despite change Lee is still deeply influenced by the Baroque period, in particular her drawings are inspired by its opulence, theatricality, and excess where grandeur and emotion are heightened through the interplay of light and shadow. Her work weaves the drama of this period into the landscape, where vistas, river scenes and reflections are rendered with surface details reminiscent in texture to rich brocade fabric, translating into intricately drawn marks with a shimmering surface, in doing so she creates a terrain that feels both earthly and dreamlike, rich with history but alive with a contemporary presence.
