Mike Portley - Biography

Michael Portley moved to Melbourne from Brisbane after completing his Bachelor of Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology in 1991. During his time as a student Portley was taught by the esteemed artist and painting lecturer William Robinson whose influence is still evident today although now, after over twenty years of exhibiting and refining his style, Portley has now fully developed an iconic visual language of his own.

Predominantly a painter of the Australian landscape, the scope of Portley’s ideas and practice when interpreting the environment is not limited to formal notions of site-specific representation. The landscapes that Portley paints accept that virtually all of our environment has been impacted by human actions and in so many cases are not in essence natural but constructed environments. In addition symbolic dreamlike interventions have also increasingly been prevalent in his approach to depicting the world around us.