Lily Mortensen is an Australian painter whose practice is guided by intuition, material curiosity, and sustained engagement with surfaces. She works across both stretched and unstretched canvas, often treating the canvas more like paper than a fixed ground. Her process frequently begins with stain priming, allowing colour to soak into the surface so that the underpainting already carries weight, movement, and atmosphere.

Mortensen experiments with materials that respond to gravity and absorption. Inks are allowed to move freely, and soft pastels are mixed with binding medium and drawn directly onto unprimed canvas before being worked into the fabric. Spray paint plays an important role in the early stages of her paintings. Used in a stippled and unconventional way, it introduces texture and variation from the outset, creating a surface that feels immersive rather than gradually built toward resolution.

Her work is not organised around a single medium. She moves between spray paint, vinyl emulsion, oil paint, and collage, allowing different processes to enter the work at different stages. She pays close attention to how materials behave once they are on the surface, and lets those responses guide the next decisions in the painting. Decisions are often revised as the painting develops, and marks are allowed to shift or lose clarity as new layers are added.

Mortensen works abstractly, but not to obscure meaning. She is interested in how a painting can feel like a place rather than an image, something entered gradually rather than read all at once. Colour is built in layers, and what sits beneath continues to shape what is visible. Interpretation is left open.