📅 Friday 14 August 2026
🕒 9:30 am – 12:30 pm
📍 Soul Lodge Gallery & Studio - 33 Gonzales Street, Amity Point
💲 $75
👥 Suited to everyone (under 16 need to be accompanied by an adult)
About
Join us for a morning of immersive art-making, a beautiful shared meal, and restorative visit into island nature. Inspired by the colours, textures, and rhythms of the island landscape, this workshop is designed to awaken your creative palette and deepen your connection with the island.
Held within the inspiring surrounds of Soul Lodge Gallery & Studio, guests will be immersed in Robyn Olsen’s retrospective exhibition celebrating 60 years of art practice — an intimate opportunity to create alongside a lifetime of creative exploration. Expect a wondrous morning of making, conversation, inspiration, and nature-infused restoration.
What to Expect
Program is jam packed with colourful explorations of place and nature under the instruction of artist Robyn Olsen. The program also includes excursions to sites of natural wonder on the island. Loads of fun guaranteed.
Soul Lodge gallery is packed with the works of Robyn Olsen, a retrospective of 60 years making nature-art.
Artist materials are provided but do bring your favourite medium or surface.
Artists Talk with Robyn Olsen, Sunday 10am - 12pm FREE (silent Auction final hammer prices)
Visitor Information
Whilst art materials are provided, favourite media and canvases are recommended.
Journaling is a wonderful practice to foster, for taking notes, drawing, jotting down any ideas, visions or perceptions that come. So bring your own sketch book.
Bring water bottle and food for any special dietary requirements you may have.
Lunch Included
Meet the Artist
Robyn Olsen - Special Guest & Artist-In-Residence
Robyn Olsen is a long time island resident of Amity. Her years of living and painting on Stradbroke have honed her perception of the natural environment here. Her large canvases are in water based medium and are an expression of a gratefulness to the island.
Honed perceptions of colour, line, form, structure have come about through her long time residency on the island. Absorbing these she processes them visually through art making.
“My home is a very quiet serene and place, surrounded by natural environment and native flora and fauna. Motivation of behind my art making is the it captures the serenity and vibrancy of the island’s natural wonder.
As a studio based painter, Robyn Olsen lives at Amity Point and has been painting for 60 years. In this time she has had the good fortune of a range of prominent artists and teachers come into my sphere, of which she has taken every advantage to develop herself in art and painting.
The selection of paintings in exhibition at Soul Lodge Gallery, Amity has been developed over the 20 years of her living at Amity.
The artwork explores the natural environment through innovative use of colour, light and form; like drawing with colour. For this reason she moved to big canvases that allowed movement of more than just hand in art making.
“In the 20 years I have lived at Amity, I can see a lot of erosion not just of the island sands but of the quality of life. My art emphasises keeping local habitats, showing the special qualities that straddle has; the diversity, the bracken, gum and banksia forrest. It is my hope that viewers of my art, see the value in keeping things as they are.”
Robyn Olsen is artist-in-resident for the 2026 and 5 day Nature Art Retreat. She also shares a large body of her art work in exhibition at Soul Lodge, August 16 - 21, and workshops in water based media which is open to new and experienced artists, Straddie Arts Trail visitors.
Location
Soul Lodge Gallery & Studio - 33 Gonzales Street, Amity Point
Accessibility: We are an event friendly to all genders, generations and cultures. The venue is accessible to those of differing abilities and mobilities.