Liam Waldie is an Australian mid-career artist based on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.
Drawn into the art world by his late grandfather, whose old watercolour box has since become a studio talisman, Liam’s work has been guided by a richly layered combination of learned skills and lived experiences. After excelling in art at school, he went on to study a BA Visual Fine Art at Queensland College of Art where he majored in illustration before turning to a graduate diploma in Teaching at Griffith University. The following decade saw Liam working with high school art students while working on commissions in his spare time before, having reached the pinnacle of the educational landscape, he decided to move to Mornington, establish his own design business and set up a studio. Since then, Liam has immersed himself in the Peninsula’s striking natural environment where he documents the conditions and elemental qualities around him, working with photography and charcoal to visually map his experiences before returning to the studio to render them in oil on canvas.
After a lifetime in hot bush environments, Liam was captivated by the Peninsula’s cold bush climate and the natural landscapes it cultivated. The gnarly character of the tea trees that line the coast, the warren of tunnels their roots shape, the coarseness of the sand, the European visual cues of the bleached, history-laden coastline and the tendency for rocks to fall apart underfoot all conspired to shape paintings that frame a moment in time and celebrate nature as the axis upon which everything else spins.
Liam has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Australia, was the recipient of the Sustaining Creative Workers Grant 2021 and has his work held in private collections around the world.