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Cara Loconte
AUSTRALIA
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"Every layer I add is another truth I refuse hiding."
Cara Loconte is an Australian-based professional artist and author who works at the intersection of visual art and storytelling, moving fluidly between the canvas and the page. Alongside her own practice she serves as a coach at the Milan Art Institute, where she mentors emerging artists through the early phases of the intensive twelve-month Mastery Program. In this role she helps students navigate the internal terrain of resistance, perfectionism, and self-doubt, guiding them through precisely the emotional landscapes she continues to explore in her own work. There is a deliberate symmetry here, since the territory she helps others cross is the same one she traverses herself, and this doubling of roles, as maker and as guide, gives her a rare intimacy with the psychological dimensions of the creative process.
Serenity Adrift | Oil
$960
24 x 20
Two whales float gracefully through the ocean, surrounded by scattered flowers and enchanted patterns, symbolic of the resilience of nature, thriving despite the pollution that drifts alongside them.
Her visual work emerges through a dynamic process that combines mixed media and oil paint to produce richly layered artworks merging portraiture, animal imagery, and the natural world. Each canvas is built in deliberate stages, drawing on texture, collage, transparent glazes, and bold brush strokes that accumulate into depth and complexity. This physical layering is never merely technical, because it mirrors the conceptual focus at the center of her practice: a sustained attention to duality, to the seen and the unseen, the beautiful and the broken, the fierce and the fragile. The way she builds a surface, stratum upon stratum, becomes a visual argument about how identity itself is constructed, accumulated, and revealed over time.
Metamorphosis | Oil
$960
24 x 20
A human face emerges from a sunlit garden full of flowers, insects, and butterflies. The painting explores the magic of growth, where seeds, sunlight, and living things remind us that we are part of nature’s cycles of change.
"I paint the feelings the world taught me to conceal."
Within this approach, light and dark function not only as visual tools but as emotional ones, and the distinction matters greatly to how her work operates. She uses contrast to reflect the complexity of the human experience, and in particular the inner experiences that society so often asks us to hide, the feelings consigned to silence or shame. The interplay of brightness and shadow on her canvases becomes a way of staging that complexity openly, refusing the pressure to present only what is acceptable or composed. In her hands, contrast is a means of telling the truth about interior life, allowing the hidden and the visible to share the same frame rather than forcing one to suppress the other.
Blossoming at Dawn | Oil
$288
12 x 12
A vibrant rooster stands amongst blooming flowers, it’s feathers echoing the rich colours of the garden around it. The scene captures a quiet morning where nature and life awaken together in harmony.
Her sensibility draws deeply from the symbolic power of Frida Kahlo and the decorative opulence of Gustav Klimt, two influences that converge in her use of bright color and of flora and fauna as extensions of the self. These elements are never simply aesthetic decisions, and to read them as ornament would be to miss their purpose entirely. They operate instead as metaphors for transformation, resilience, vulnerability, and intuition, carrying meaning that runs beneath their visual appeal. The natural imagery becomes a vocabulary through which inner states are made visible, so that a flower or an animal is doing emotional and symbolic work rather than merely pleasing the eye.
This artwork was created at a time of personal transformation where my resilience has been tested to it's limits. It represents humans ability to find the strength to break through obstacles and emerge stronger on the other side, just as the horse pushes through the flowers and branches.
Breaking Through | Mixed Media
$1,728
35 x 24
"Pain isolated me before it taught me anything, so now I turn it into work that reaches the people still sitting alone inside theirs."
"I am fascinated by the slow, uncomfortable process of becoming, the kind that happens in stages and never arrives all at once. My whole practice asks what happens when we stop hiding our scars, and what beauty might emerge if we let the wild, unfiltered parts of ourselves take up space instead of shrinking them. I have seen how illness and trauma can close a person off from the world, and I refuse to let those experiences stay in the shadows where shame keeps them. So I build, layer by layer, in paint and in words, until something whole appears. If a single person walks away knowing they are a beautiful, layered being, the work has done exactly what I made it to do."
She Knew Too Much | Oil
$288
12 x 12
She knew too much, the weight of secrets and the truths whispered in shadows, but her mind and heart could not be silenced. The walls tried to cage her insight, yet she emerged, wiser, unyielding, and luminous in her knowing.
The portraits themselves often hold a direct and unwavering gaze, and that gaze is among the most distinctive features of her work. By meeting the viewer so frankly, the figures invite an emotional connection that is quiet but potent, refusing the safety of an averted glance. Cara wants her audience to feel seen, and equally to see themselves in the work, to recognize their own interior lives reflected back at them. This reciprocity is central to her intention: the painting looks at the viewer as much as the viewer looks at it, and in that mutual regard a genuine emotional exchange becomes possible, one that asks the viewer to be present rather than merely to observe.
Apex Rising | Oil
$160
10 x 8
Orcas are apex predators that thrive in the most extreme oceans, from Antarctica to the tropics. The fiery orange against deep blue speaks to their power to hunt, adapt, and lead pods through changing seas. The term Rising, captures their breach and their resilience under pressure.
At the heart of her practice lies advocacy, and this commitment gives the entire body of work its underlying purpose. Through both her art and her writing, she aims to raise awareness around issues that are often silenced or stigmatized, including endometriosis and domestic violence. Having witnessed the way chronic pain and personal trauma can isolate people, cutting them off from understanding and support, she uses her platform to give voice to experiences that live in the shadows. Her series Alchemising Pain and Breaking Through speak directly to this mission, taking suffering as their raw material and turning it into something transformative, so that what might have remained private anguish becomes a shared and visible act of resistance.
Australian magpies are fiercely territorial and intelligent. They survive drought, urban sprawl, and bushfire, while defending their young. The term Songline refers to routes across Country that trace the journeys of Ancestral Beings from the Dreaming. It’s said that if you know the song, you can navigate hundreds of kilometers of desert without a map.
Songline Guardians | Oil
$160
10 x 8
Her fictional writing is fueled by the same ethos that drives her painting, extending her concerns from the canvas into narrative. Drawing inspiration from the authors Nicholas Sparks and JoJo Moyes, she is drawn to stories that tackle complex family and relationship dynamics without shying away from heartache, yet always leave room for warmth, hope, and redemption. Her writing, like her painting, is interested in what it means to heal after loss, illness, or betrayal, and the two practices illuminate one another. The same impulse that layers a canvas also structures a story, each form pursuing the question of how a person moves through pain toward something whole.
"A flower can carry resilience; an animal can carry grief."
Cara graduated from the Milan Art Gallery Mastery Program in 2024, an experience that profoundly shaped both her technical skill and her creative confidence, and that marked a turning point in her development as an artist. Since then her career has gained real momentum across Australia and internationally. Her work has been on display at The Joy Collective in Maleny, where she also completed a large-scale mural that now forms part of a collective, evolving artwork celebrating the local creative community. That mural project reflects a conviction she holds firmly, that art should be collaborative, accessible, and tangible, embedded in the life of a community rather than sealed away from it.
Still Standing | Mixed Media
$308
14 x 11
Kangaroos endure heat, drought, and fire. They pause, watch, and conserve energy, but they persist. The collage fragments suggest human stories encroaching on their habitat, yet the roo holds its ground. “Still Standing” is literal and symbolic for both the species and the bush it calls home.
The momentum has continued to build through a series of significant exhibitions and selections. In 2025 her work was selected as a finalist in the Little Treasures competition at Milan Art Gallery in Sarasota, Florida. That same year she exhibited at the Loft Gallery, the Arts Connect pop-up gallery, and the MADE Sunshine Coast Art Fair in November 2025. More recently she was selected to take part in the Teravarna FOCUS art fair's digital showcase in New York City from the twenty-first to the twenty-fourth of May 2026, an opportunity that allows her to bring her distinctly Australian perspective to a genuinely global audience and to extend the reach of her advocacy beyond national borders.
Pelicans travel thousands of kilometres across inland Australia, following flood and drought. They’re built for endurance, riding thermals and waiting out droughts. The collaged text and waratahs echo migration stories and regeneration. “The Long Haul” is their reality: feast, famine, flight, repeat.
The Long Haul | Mixed Media
$308
14 x 11
Whether she is painting, writing, or coaching, Cara's mission remains consistent throughout: to create work that honors both shadow and light, refusing to privilege one at the expense of the other. She is fascinated by transformation and by the slow, layered, often uncomfortable process of becoming, the very process her stratified canvases enact. Her art poses searching questions about what happens when we stop hiding our scars, and about what beauty emerges when we let the wild, unfiltered parts of ourselves take up space. Above all she hopes that collectors, readers, and students alike walk away from her work with a sense of recognition, an understanding that they too are beautiful, layered beings, and that the parts of themselves they have been taught to conceal might instead be allowed to surface.
Fleeting Beauty | Oil
$72
6 x 6
A small Monarch butterfly, it’s wings glistening in the light, lands softly on a flower in a fleeting moment of beauty to be appreciated by humans.
"My portraits look back, asking you to be truly present."
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