ABOUT ROBYN & HER WORK

Robyn Markey paints from her home studio in Armidale in the New England region of NSW, surrounded by the gardens that supply most of what she paints. Her work brings flowers together with vintage crockery - objects chosen for being ordinary rather than precious. Trained at Adelaide Central School of Art, she works in oil, building each painting up in layers over several weeks. She is particularly drawn to floriography: the historical, cultural, religious and medicinal meanings flowers have carried across different times and places. That research shapes each composition, informing not just what she paints but what she paints it in. Classically trained, her work is known for its colour, fine detail and quiet, considered stillness.

Robyn is a three-time finalist in the Lethbridge 20000 Small Scale Art Prize (2024, 2025, 2026), and in 2025, recipient of the Denis Diderot Grant for an artist residency at Château Orquevaux in France. One painting from that residency, Softly, The Dawn, now hangs in the Château's permanent collection at Galerie Diderot.

But the paintings themselves stay close to home. Most begin just outside her studio door — roses in bloom, fruit on the branch, the particular quality of morning light falling across a familiar surface — built up slowly, layer by layer, until it feels balanced and still. It's work for collectors and homeowners who want an original painting for a design-led home — one with a story, a name, and a paper trail behind it.