Vanessa Stockard

“Perfect petals and stems have little personality and often no perfume at all” – Vanessa Stockard.

Vanessa Stockard is a master at transforming the familiarities of everyday life into whimsical adventures. Her paintings are infused with the poetry of everyday events – her two year old daughter and the joy she brings, domestic creatures reinvented with bazaar anthropomorphic attributes. Amusing and sweet, awkward and potentially dangerous, Vanessa captures the unique and the sometimes abstract but she also captures the interesting and beautiful connection between things. She breathes life into the delicate quiet moments that tend to get overlooked.

The weird and wonderful world of Vanessa Stockard is rich with emotion and colour, She picks her colours as if plucking blooms from a garden. Her memories are a major inspiration for her work along with the experiences of a slower more intimate country life. She will capture your very heartbeat and hand it to you on a glimmering silver platter.

Vanessa was born in 1975 in Sydney. She spent her formative years in a small country town in the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales. At 12 she returned to Sydney as a boarder at Abbotsleigh. After graduating from the College of Fine Arts (COFA) Sydney in 1998 with a BFA, she exhibited locally and internationally. Her prizes include: 2015 – Highly Commended – 43rd Muswellbrook Art Prize for Painting. 2014 – Finalist – Caldera Art Prize, Tweed Regional Gallery/Caldera Art Gallery, Murwillumbah. 2010 – Winner – Stanthorpe Art prize. Vanessa was an Archibald finalist in 2017 & 2018. On both occasions her entries have been self portraits. This year (2019) she became an Archibald finalist for the third year in a row with a portrait of fellow artist McLean Edwards. In 2019 Vanessa has a number of solo and group exhibitions in Australia, Hong Kong, LA & New York, proving she is extremely well collected, with prices still very affordable!