About Grace Paleg

Grace Paleg is an Australian artist and teacher who specializes in the medium of pastel.

She keeps changing her mind about how long this apprenticeship is! Maybe a few years, maybe ten or twenty as she once thought – not so – Grace is up to 55 and is now beginning to hope her apprenticeship won’t be cut short. There is a lot of work to be done and she feels now with each new painting her journey has just begun.

She has always enjoyed and been confident in her abilities to draw, and happily, no one ever told her that she couldn’t.

She studied Graphic Design at Swinburne in Melbourne for two years and life drawing and portraiture at East Sydney Tech. Although Grace enjoyed very much the life of an art student. She feels that the most valuable instruction she received was working privately in oils with the late Leslie Sinclair at Monsalvat in 1985. She greatly appreciated her expertise in tonal impressionism and her honesty and quiet humility. Earlier, she also benefited from the tuition of the late Allan Martin at his studio in Eltham. She has never had lessons in pastel but knows that her foundation in oil paves the way perfectly for pastel.

After she had two young sons, she found it more and more difficult to juggle the busy lifestyle with the restrained requirements that come along when working in oil. Not so the get-up-and-go of pastel. A friend and fellow artist introduced her to the medium in 1987 and she has been with it happily ever since.

Grace began exhibiting in 1990 and joined The Pastel Society of Victoria, Australia in 1993. She is also a member of the Pastel Society of Australia, the Australian Guild of Realists Artists; and past President of the South Coast Pastel Society.

Her family spent seventeen years in country Victoria before a move in 1994 to the south coast of N.S.W. where she opened the Grace Paleg Fine Art Studio Gallery two years later.

It is from here that Grace continues to work and teach classes as well as hold workshops for various groups around Australia.

“View Grace’s detailed awards“

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