BIOGRAPHY

Cassie La Reux grew up next to Ku-rin-gai Chase National Park in New South Wales, Australia. This proximity to nature helped imbue within Cassie a natural affinity with Australia’s fauna and flora. Much of her family worked for the National Parks and Wildlife Service and travelling around the country visiting them provided an excellent education in Australia’s unique environment. Her childhood was spent sketching and painting wildlife and landscapes, trying to add into the picture what she had learnt.

Cassie’s first published artwork was a detailed pen drawing of a steam train in 1973. She was aged four at the time. Since then her artwork has gone from strength to strength, winning numerous art prizes and awards at school and being exhibited in the student section of The Sydney Royal Easter Show in 1981. In 1982, a two-year position as resident cartoonist for two national magazines, Earthmoving Australia and Materials Handling Monthly was secured. Her first commission was also sold this year, an acrylic on canvas of an Australian Outback scene.

During the late eighties, Cassie worked as a graphic designer for a t-shirt manufacturer, where she printed many of Ken Done’s earlier works and learnt his usage of colour, whilst designing her own creations.

Into the early nineties Cassie was employed in various positions in desktop publishing and graphic design, creating logos and advertising promotions. In 1994 she exhibited in the Edagowa/Gosford Sister City Art Competition and was contracted to Osprey Enterprises, where she worked as an illustrator and produced character designs for many of their projects. Later that year she designed ‘Mr. Cool’, a penguin character that appeared in national and international advertising and product promotion, for Quality Special Products.

As the Resident Artist, she instigated an Arts promotion at Dooralong Valley Resort, teaching guests painting skills, appearing in the local papers and later a segment with Ernie Dingo on Channel 7’s Television life-style show “The Great Outdoors”.

In late 2000 Cassie was contracted by Robert Williams Productions to merchandise and design the program and the production logo, ‘The Soloist’, for the Sydney performance of the Off Broadway production of “Naked Boys Singing”.

At present working mainly in traditional watercolour, acrylic, pastel, pencil and sculpture, Cassie has broadened her horizons to branch out into digital media, using Photoshop and Painter to express her artistic visions. She has also authored an article on digital image creation using Photoshop for the American magazine Renderosity. She has also been studying physics and attempting to merge this education into some of her more adventurous works! Currently learning Flash, Cassie plans to start animating her creations and display them to the world via the Internet.

Over the last twenty years this very talented artist has been commissioned for over 300 works for private collections in Australia and, in the last two years, New Zealand, The United States and Italy.