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Robbi is an award winning best selling painter and author.
Robbi studied at the Victorian College of the arts and since graduating has worked in the arts and has exhibited widely in Australia and overseas.
Prize Finalist
Prize Winning
Artworks: 41
Robbi Neal is a best selling award winning artist and author. She lives in Ballarat and trained at the Victorian College of the Arts and on finishing Art School won the Footscray Aquisition Prize twice. In 2020 after regularly exhibiting her work in solo shows, raising 5 children, surviving aggressive cancer and just generally letting life get in the way of her own goals she was able to return to full time to painting and writing.
In 2020 she was a finalist in the Lethbridge Small Scale Art Award. In 2021 she was a finalist in the 66th Blake Prize and in 2022 the Ravenswood Prize for Women Artists.
In 2024 she was a finalist in the prestigious Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing and in 2025 was shortlisted in the Lethbridge Landscape Prize. Her latest book ‘With Winter Comes Darkness’ won the prestigious Daphne Du Maurier Kiss of Death Prize 2025 in USA and Canada.
Robbi has a studio in Ballarat, in the back garden surrounded by the flora that works its way into her painting.
“Robbi’s work explores themes of belonging, memory, and deep connection to Country. Through evocative, layered storytelling, Robbi reflects on place, identity, and the enduring ties between land and spirit and love and community. Her paintings are both personal and universal—offering quiet meditations on home, heritage, and the rhythms of the natural world. Celebrated for their ability to weave narrative and image, Robbi continues to create work that speaks to the heart of connection, belonging and care for Country.”- Giorgio Pilla, Redot Gallery Singapore.
Robbi has mixed racial heritage. She is painfully shy, she says she is a hermit. It took her a year to put a photo of herself on her profile that shows her face. She has always suffered from depression which she blames on a childhood rotten enough to write a best selling award winning book about. Sometimes the more miserable she feels the brighter her paintings get as she believes that looking for joy in small things is where we find god. She says her works are her voice and are landscapes grounded in her grandmother’s Country but are also emotional landscapes about connection and belonging and finding the small things in life that are easy to miss but give our lives true meaning and happiness. Robbi loves to explore different ways of creating art, through works on paper and painting on canvas.
.Some of Robbi’s shortlisting in major prizes:
Exhibitions have been held in Redot Gallery Singapore, Art Atrium Sydney, Casula Powerhouse Sydney, Perry Prize Sydney, ROAR Melbourne, Rhumbarella’s Melbourne, Castlemaine Fringe, Lethbridge Gallery Brisbane, Footscray Gallery and Latrobe University Gallery.
Artlovers is Robbi’s preferred seller of her works.
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