Sean Leonard is an abstract contemporary artist based in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, Australia.

Born in 1985 and raised in regional Victoria, Australia, he now lives and works on Bundjalung Nation in Brunswick Heads. With a background in fashion and a lifelong painting practice, his work sits somewhere between abstraction, drawing, and visual language.

Leonard creates mixed media paintings that feel part scrapbook, part diary; layered surfaces where marks, symbols, fragments, and gestures build into loose emotional narratives. His work often explores the push and pull between joy and unease, alongside broader ideas around the human condition and memory.

Described as having “a restless energy,” the paintings move through a kind of non-linear storytelling, where meaning is suggested rather than fixed. Instead of painting scenes directly, Leonard approaches painting as a form of shorthand poetry, building a personal lexicon of shapes and marks that carry emotional weight without needing to become fully representational.

Working intuitively, he’s interested in how little information is needed for a viewer to recognise an object, a feeling, or a memory. Layers are left visible, erased, reworked, and painted over, creating surfaces that resemble palimpsests, traces of earlier decisions still sitting beneath the final image. Through gestural abstraction and an instinctive use of colour and form, the works balance spontaneity with reflection, often feeling like a conversation between archaeology and visual note-taking.