A full time artist since 2008, Leanne Christie dedicates her waking hours to understanding the painting process. Educated at the influential Rhodes University art school, Leanne was tutored in not only the painting as a final product but was instilled with the love of the process itself. Her exposure to the Grahamstown group through the critical analysis of Professor Robert Brooks and Noel Hodnett, laid the foundation of her present practice. Leanne's work reveals the rewards that only labour in the studio can bring. There is an intuitive understanding of the consistency of paint, the careful placement of brushstrokes to lead the viewer at a pace determined by the artist and the removal of colour as a fundamental element. One finds a developing maturity with the medium and a questioning of the visual reality. The growing awareness of the irrelevance between the laws which govern nature and the reality of the painting, has lead Leanne to experiment with a new hierarchy: brushstroke, composition, colour without the retreat into abstraction. Leanne's painting have become easily identifiable by her sensitive myriad of greys and brushwork which dances on the edge of abstraction. Future works from this developing artist will continue to reveal Leanne's intrigue with the possible tension one can create with her new hierarchy bound by representational subject matter.