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Dr Lucila Zentner is an Australian Contemporary oil painter Artist. Lucila’s key theme – spanning several galleries and private exhibitions in Australia – is the floral still life. Lucila has a painterly impressionistic style. She paints outlined flowers with energetically abstracted elements in a painterly impressionistic style. Her influences include Van Gogh’s movement expressed in the brushstrokes, Gaugin’s outlines and flattening of form, and in places Joaquin Sorolla’s use of light and colour.

In this exhibition “Flowers in Blue Vase” are floral (mostly poppy) 2024 paintings, some named ‘Surrender” (signifying a surrender to the beauty of the flowers) and ‘Flowers for …’ (celebrating the presence of a vase of flowers as an accompaniment to a moment or an event). The blue vase pictured is a real vase, gifted to Lucila by her mother. The vase becomes a variation of itself in the paintings. Lucila’s favourite flower to paint is the poppy, for the grace of its unfurling buds, the curve of the stems, and the extraordinary colour of the petals.

“I paint ‘alla prima’. In the first moments of the painting I rough in a sepia paint-drawn very freehand image with outline and shadow, followed by new additions to the composition and adding of colour. I aim to retain some of the initial marks and initial distortion in the finished painting.

Ultimately, translating a painting into words is difficult; the medium is wordless and its reality falls between descriptions. I best describe my paintings as superimpositions of the real and the imagined. I paint in a state of lucid transparency – where the combination of what I see, what I imagine, what I remember -all get painted. In the end – a magic-realism emerges, leaving space for interpretation and ownership from the viewer.”

Mollydooker Wines is a family estate in the McLaren Vale district of South Australia particularly known for its full-bodied, silky red wines made from classic Australian grape varieties like Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon. These frequently gain high ratings from Wine Spectator and Robert Parker and are among the most sought-after wines produced in Australia.