About Marlyse
I am a self-taught artist, born in the French-speaking part of Switzerland and living in Australia since 1971. I now work from my home studio on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, surrounded by sea, changing skies, birdlife and the particular quality of Australian light that has fascinated me ever since I arrived here.
Creativity has been a constant thread throughout my life, although it has taken many different forms. I began my professional life as a fashion designer under the label Marlyse of Switzerland, later co-founded the Inner Peace Institute for Wellbeing, and have also worked as a teacher and author. Painting gradually became the place where many of these different strands came together.
I paint largely by intuition. I rarely begin with a fixed image or a carefully worked-out plan. Instead, I build layers of colour, texture and marks and allow the painting to reveal its own direction. Sometimes it becomes a landscape, sometimes something cosmic or dreamlike, and sometimes something far less easily defined.
For me, painting is a process of discovery rather than illustration.
Nature is an important source of inspiration — trees, water, distant horizons, the night sky, shifting light — but I am equally interested in atmosphere, emotion and the sense that something may exist just beyond what we can immediately see.
That is perhaps why my work moves so freely between landscape, abstraction and more visionary imagery.
Above all, I still approach painting with curiosity. I like surprises. I like not knowing exactly what will happen next. And after a lifetime spent exploring creativity in different forms, I still find enormous pleasure in watching an image emerge from an empty surface and become something with a life of its own.