LORI Pensini's portraits are beautiful, ethereal, strong - and imbued with the language, stories and soul of the country where she grew up and lives now.
The Boyup Brook-based fine artist, who started painting while on a Pilbara pastoral station as a young 20-something, has been recognised in the nation's most prestigious arts awards.
But, so far, her reputation has largely flown under the radar of the nation's artistic ranks.
She has well-earned a higher profile.
Her latest accolade is winning the Royal Perth Show Art Prize, WA's only art award focusing on landscape.
The award, announced this month, is one of the most prestigious in WA, includes a $20,000 first prize and has returned in 2022 after a two-year hiatus.
"When I started painting, I was a cook and jillaroo and I started painting what we were doing,'' Ms Pensini said.
"That evolved into considering our relationship with the landscape and going back into my intimate, childhood memories and recollections of the language of the bush and being present in the language and the spirit of the bush.
"My art practice has evolved into my understanding of that language and my relationship - right or wrong - with our landscape and how important it is for our physical and mental health.''
Ms Pensini's figurative paintings always have a strong element of story-telling.
"My artwork is all about reconnecting people to the landscape and to do that you have to give the artwork a purpose and to do that, you need to give it a story,'' she said.
"I am always thinking about how I create that connection for people."
Her Royal Show work, 'Ascension', which depicts a cloud of wattle floating over a muted rural vista, provides that connection in spades.
And it was literally created from the bush around her.
Ms Pensini said in the lead up to creating the piece, her husband Warren Pensini and 22-year-old son Mitch were fighting a large bushfire at Hester, near Bridgetown.
The experience, she said, was horrific.
In the aftermath, they were surrounded by lots of burnt wood.
She gathered some up, grinding the charcoal into a powder and mixing it with an oil base to create her own pigments.
It created a palette of earthy tones - and a challenge - as she had no real control over the hues.
"I will continue to keep using that wood,'' she said.
"The trees have been around for centuries.
"They have memories, they tell a story.
"I am reshaping that story into a painting.''
Ms Pensini was born in Narrogin and her strongest memories of childhood are of being transfixed by the bush on and around her family's farm at Yilliminning, in the Wheatbelt.
She has dyslexia and struggled with her learning at Narrogin High School, however she connected with the landscape and would disappear into the bush, where she could be herself.
"It is full of life and death and it sticks with you so much and I found that was where my solace was,'' Ms Pensini said.
She remembers striving to work out what her surroundings might be trying to say to her.
"I have always had this real connection with the landscape and, when I was younger, I used to believe that the landscape had different languages,'' she said.
"When I was eight, I would sit in the bush trying to understand what the landscape was trying to tell me.
"It really formed a part of my childhood.
"I think that was my greatest learning experience."
The memory has resonated strongly in her painting and, as she has recently uncovered more of her family history on the land, it has helped her make sense of her strong connection to the country.
Ms Pensini is an eighth generation grazier - hailing from the pioneering Quartermaine family, which traces back to the first European settlement of WA.
"We were one of the first families to settle and open up - rightly or wrongly - the Katanning region, through Woodanilling, through York and Beverley,'' she said.
"And we were one of the first families to open up up what is now called the Albany Highway, it was the stock route that our family created.
"My forebears married indigenous women and I've only just found out that we have had an unbroken tenure of the land, we have always been on the land in some form.
"Discovering that has been really empowering for me and my stories and where they are coming from and how long they go through."
Ms Pensini paints a mix of portraits, landscapes and botanicals, drawing on her European and indigenous family history and her own experience of 50-odd years living on the land.
"I combine both the European and indigenous lineages of my family heritage to express ideas about identity and belonging, while exploring the complex history of the remote region where I live,'' she said.
Though not formally artistically trained, Ms Pensini remembers drawing a lot as a child and finding comfort in the quiet, contemplative task.
"I found that was my happy place,'' she said.
She had no ambitions for a career in art - no idea of being able to form a living from interpreting the land and, particularly, the stories of her female forebears.
As a teenager at that time, farming in the country, creativity was not something that was considered, nor encouraged.
"Unfortunately art and imagination wasn't considered a strength,'' she said.
"It was considered a weakness back then.
"It wasn't a good career choice, so I was never encouraged to do it.
"I had no artist's education.
"Before I started painting I had never been to an art gallery.
"Art and cattle didn't really go together."
She met Warren Pensini as a 19-year-old and within a year or two the newly-married couple moved to his family's cattle station, Wyloo, in the Pilbara.
An aunt, who was living in the United Kingdom, was terrified for her mental health.
"She was petrified that I was going to a million acres in the middle of nowhere with no other female for company,'' Ms Pensini said.
"She thought that I would go crazy.''
Remembering Ms Pensini's childhood fondness for drawing - her Aunt Jill sent her one thousand pounds' worth of art supplies and books.
"She said 'for Christ's sake, just do something, draw something','' Ms Pensini said.
"So I started painting.
"I felt so guilty that she had spent so much money."
Ms Pensini's first solo exhibition was at the Pilbara Fine Arts Gallery in Karratha in 1995 - she has proceeded to a further 25 solo exhibitions and been hung in more than 50 group shows.
In 2013, she garnered early critical recognition as a semi-finalist in Australia's richest portrait prize, the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, and a long list of other prestigious accolades have followed.
In 2021, she won the $50,000 Kilgour Art Prize at the Newcastle Art Gallery, in New South Wales, and in 2019, won the Toni Fini Foundation artists prize, part of the Lester awards.
This year she was a finalist in the women-only Portia Geach Memorial Award, the National Capital Art Prize and The Alice Prize, a contemporary art prize with a rare birds extinction piece.
She was also hung in the much-anticipated Salon Des Refuse, an alternative exhibition of works entered into the Archibald Prize.
She is represented by Gallerysmith, in Melbourne, and The Studio Gallery and Gallows Gallery in WA and has works in significant corporate and private collections.
From those first days drawing in spare moments in a cattle station kitchen, she now paints seven days a week in a light-filled studio on the family's farming property at Boyup Brook, where they moved in 2002.
Ms Pensini largely paints oils on linen, usually with five easels on the go at once.
She takes about eight to 10 months to create a body of work enough for each new collection - and also works in sculpture, photography, graphic design and mixed media.
Ms Pensini sees her art and her husband's work - breeding Black Angus cattle under the Blackwood Valley beef brand - as two sides of the same coin: a yin and yang of reading the landscape.
"He is the physical regenerative aspect of the partnership and I am more the cultural side of it,'' she said.
Women and birds, banksia and wattle flowers, wandoo and eucalyptus are recurring themes.
Women, she says, are the heart of rural communities and farming families and provide its backbone with their ability to survive in what can be a harsh environment.
Banksia and wattle - the beautiful king feeders of the bush - are likewise hardy and tough survivors.
Growing in poor soil, they flower under adverse conditions.
Imagery of wandoo and eucalyptus talks to healing.
"The banksia grows in such poor conditions,'' Ms Pensini said.
"I relate that to the rural women who have an extraordinary ability to flower as women though that incredible hardship.''
Her paintings often highlight the fragility of the landscape, but also offer a spirit of hope.
A visual language of flowers, which she developed, has become a personal signature.
It is all a means of expressing inner strength - her own, her contemporaries and that of the people who went before her - and how their influence has shaped her.
"My paintings portray my personal journey and I hope to link people to narratives that reawaken their own life stories and transformations," she said.
