M A R I L O U P A L A Z O N
Marilou Palazon is a contemporary Australian artist who has been painting large-scale botanicals, Australian Birds, and water themes for over 20 years. She treats them more like dramatic landscapes — exploring textures, ranges, light play and folds.
Choosing to eliminate a “feminine” reference, Palazon instead emphasises the theatrical and sculptural play of form in a contemporary and monumental scale. Adopting a realistic style, Palazon employs expressive and loose brushwork and unfinished areas that allow the viewer to fall into the work and to travel across the surface. Yet, within her love of realism, there is no desire for hyper-realism — not needing to explain every detail instead, keeping the surface texture full of painterly brush and glaze work. Ragged markings are used to lift the energy of the piece, rather than the stillness and precision of a still life.
Palazon acknowledges layered emotional and historical content for water and bathers, a long recognised passion in art, from Renaissance to Impressionist masters or classical platforms. Exploring universal themes of beauty, time, fragility, life, death, decay and birth. “Presently, the world is an unforgiving place, a society on edge. My need for simple pleasures and to refocus on a subject as simple as swimmers, of figures in water- the water being just what it is- cleansing and refreshing. Alternatively to me its mass and seductive darker depths have always been representative of the unconscious- the greater unknown.”
Marilou is a graduate of COFA, UNSW, Sydney and holds a degree and Graduate diploma in Visual Arts. She lives on the North Shore , Sydney with her family.
