Our People
18 February, 2026
A love letter in colour: Lesley Hunter’s ‘Wild Birds’ at Art Trax
On a warm Sunday afternoon in Beaufort’s old railway station, visitors drifted through Art Trax with the easy pace of a regional opening — a few familiar faces, quiet conversations, people stopping, doubling back, then stopping again. Lesley Hunter’s work has a way of doing that. Across the room, the paintings didn’t rely on subject matter to announce themselves. Birds, landscapes, memories from travel — different surfaces, different scales — yet the same hand was evident throughout. The colour relationships were consistent, the decisions confident. You never need to check the wall label to know who had made them.
Lesley’s Wild Birds exhibition opened at Art Trax on Sunday alongside a pop-up art sale, and will continue until March 16 at the Beaufort Railway Station gallery (open Friday to Monday, 11am to 3pm).
It is a show shaped by years of looking and working — and, quietly, by the act of leaving.
After decades living in the region, Lesley is preparing to move to the Mornington Peninsula to be closer to family.
“My family are all down on the peninsula, and I must admit, I’ve got advanced glaucoma. I am going to lose my driving licence,” she said.
In regional Victoria, the loss of a licence is not a small detail. It redraws the map of daily life. Lesley speaks about the move plainly, without drama, the way people do when a decision has already been made.
A long-time contributor and award winner at the Annual Pyrenees Art Exhibition and the Beaufort Agricultural Show Art Show, Lesley has been part of the region’s artistic fabric for decades. But the work on the walls this month does not feel like a summing-up. If anything, it carries the energy of someone still testing ideas.
“I don’t think about that. I just plough colour on,” she said.
The simplicity of the explanation belies the sophistication of the result. It feels earned the product of years where judgement and instinct have collapsed into the same movement.
A defining feature of the exhibition is a series of works painted on cardboard, using house paint — a practice that began out of necessity and evolved into something deliberate.
“You don’t have to spend $200 or $400 on a canvas,” Lesley said, “you can just get cardboard from the recycle, and if you don’t like it, it can go in the compost bin.
“So I think for me, cardboard gives me a freedom to paint without restriction.”
Cardboard brings its own challenges. It bends. It must be mounted to hang properly. But those limitations are part of the appeal. The material lowers the stakes and encourages decisiveness.
House paint sharpens that urgency further.
“The thing with house paint is, in between your page and your palette, you’ve got about 15 seconds before it dries,” Lesley said.
There’s no room for hesitation.
“I’m not afraid of anything, so if I colour, I just put it on and just go for it, I don’t think too much about it,” she said.
Sometimes the result surprises her.
“I stand back and think, I did that in 10 minutes,” she said, describing one piece completed quickly during a recent pop-up art demonstration.
Lesley’s art has long been shaped by a life lived widely. She and her late husband Bill spent years overseas and across Australia.
“We were overseas for a lot of years, and then we lived in third world countries,” she said.
They returned to Australia, worked casually in Alice Springs, and eventually settled in the district, first buying a property at Elmhurst, followed by a move to Beaufort.
“We’ve been in the region since 2000,” she said.
After Bill became ill, the couple retired. He died in 2017.
“Bill promised me he was going to live to be 130 but he piped down,” she said, laughing — humour carrying affection and loss in the same breath.
Since then, Lesley has continued to paint, exhibit and remain closely connected to the region’s creative community.
The birds that fill Wild Birds are no accident. Lesley describes herself as a bird watcher, drawing many works from her own photographs, while others come from shared moments and images offered with permission.
One painting was inspired by a recent trip.
“I was on Kangaroo Island earlier this year,” she said, before explaining her surprise to encounter one of Australia’s treasured rare birds.
“They’re critically endangered, the red tail cockatoo, and I never expected to see some, but I saw seven,” she said.
The photograph she worked from wasn’t her own.
“It was one of the girls on the trip who gave me permission to use it,” she said.
That detail matters. A shared experience, translated into paint, then offered back to the public in a railway station gallery in Beaufort. The exchange between travel and place, between personal history and community, runs quietly through the exhibition.
The pop-up sale running alongside Wild Birds is practical on the surface, offering discounted works for sale. But spend time in the room and it reads differently. It feels like a thank-you — a body of work offered back to a region where Lesley built a life, made friends and established herself as a respected local artist.
She is already thinking ahead.
“I’ve got a studio and a new house I intend to continue to paint. There, I will be painting on cardboard,” she said.
For visitors to Art Trax over the coming weeks, Wild Birds is not just an exhibition to see, but a moment to mark — a chance to stand with the work of someone who has been part of the Pyrenees’ cultural fabric for a long time, and to recognise that departures, like paintings, don’t have to be loud to be meaningful.
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