Ashlee Bucholtz | Beneath The Rhododendron Bridge
Beneath The Rhododendron Bridge | 2025
Acrylic on canvas
92 x 92 cm
Signed verso
$2,800
These figurative painting for myself, evoke a memory so strong that it became palpable. Whether it's good, bad, or maybe even less grand than the actual event, it is simply addictive for an impressionistic artist like me.
The human mind recalls the narrative in fractal images, but the sensation of the sun piercing the canopy inside the Rhododendron tree, with its broken rope bridge from my childhood, becomes the physical proof that time has passed and that the memory was real.
My intention is never to be romantic, but there is something to be said for attempting to create the whimsical or even the impossible. And that is what this painting represents to me.
The colours I chose for this painting had to be excessive, as my brush marks, such as the yellow bleeding out the details on the ground, while the shadows become tons of monochromatic pink.
BIO
Ashlee Bucholtz
Born 1987, Lithgow, NSW. Lives and works in the Blue Mountains, NSW.
Ashlee’s current painting practice focuses on the narrative of the invisible and our perception of the unknown. Her paintings pull at the underpinning structures of old spaces, memories and the sensation felt through my body. “For myself, the idea of memory, space and body are not clearly defined, and the veneer of these structures no longer resemble a function but instead a sensibility”.
These artworks demonstrate the amalgamation of reductive methods accompanied by a narrative. The viewer is presented with ambiguous shapes and spaces painted in unconventional colour. The purposely selected colour pallet of complementary pastels helps form a discord, creating a sensibility of something at calm and in discomfort. By using colour to express the sensory experience of the story, the painting can move beyond the memory and create something new.
Ashlee Bucholtz is a young emerging artist and a Graduate of the National Art School, Sydney (2016) and Newcastle Art School, Hunter Street TAFE (2013). Since completing her degree, Ashlee has been invited to exhibit at Gallery Factory 49, the Saatchi and Saatchi office exhibit, a Drawing Internship at the National Art School, The Bathurst Art Fair, & was recently selected to exhibit at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre for the 2021 Portraits Exhibition & the annual Collector’s Edition show.
But her highest achievement to date, was being selected for the international Cill Rialaig Artist Residency in Ireland, which she attended and practiced her craft in 2017.
