Based in Wollongong, Wendi Leigh is a re-emerging artist after a twelve year break during which she designed and manufactured her own prints into women’s’ fashions. Her art practice started in 1989 and led to the creation of the O.D.O.R.I art movement in 2019 that describes her styles as ‘overt distortion of real imagery’. It has been likened to digital art but is a personal derivation of simplifying detail to the minimum and using colour to suggest light and form. The colours used are unique and universally appealing, no doubt derived from her fashion-design talents and reflected in their aesthetic, before taking up the brushes again.

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Wendi has won many prizes and exhibited in over 27 shows. She currently shows her work in four galleries throughout NSW and Queensland.

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Being a full time artist Wendi devotes much of her time to experimentation with gouache on board and paper. The gouache work utilises the flat opaqueness of the medium, which has been likened to silk screen printing. The flippant outline line of the brushwork suggests rhythm and emotion within the imagery. The subjects include a narrative that records current life from urban sprawl, Australian flora and fauna, social interaction and household animals. These subjects hold the underlying stories of hope and joy in a time where anxiety and disillusion of a worldwide pandemic holds many people in negative frameworks. Wendi’s work, painted in soothing colours and shapes, brings a certain peace to the viewer, which in turn renews a sense of wellbeing and happiness.