Randal Arvilla is a Costa Rican-Australian visual artist, currently living between Sydney, Australia, and Costa Rica. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of San Francisco, California, and studied Painting at the National Art School in Sydney. Arvilla is also a certified International Tour Director with a passion for combining his love of art, culture, and history through tours across Australia and internationally.
Arvilla’s artistic career is marked by his distinctive exploration of oils, encaustics, and a variety of mixed media, including collage and found objects. His works are a testament to his fascination with the fragility of nature, cultural identity, memory, and loss. Arvilla’s use of encaustic painting, a technique involving heated beeswax and natural pigments, became central to his practice after being inspired by ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman portrait paintings. His dynamic and textured works, rich in colour and depth, reveal his contemporary reinterpretation of ancient techniques, alongside his unique visual language of abstraction and expressive mark-making.
Throughout his career, Arvilla has gained recognition in the Australian art scene, having won the St. Vincent’s Hospital and National Art School Painting Exhibition Award in 2011 and being a finalist in multiple prestigious competitions, such as the John Olsen Figure Drawing Prize, the Fleurieu Food and Wine Art Prize, and the Chippendale New World Art Prize. He has exhibited in numerous curated group shows and held three solo exhibitions: Point of Departure (2012), Encáustica Contemporánea (2016), and Terra Habitatur (2018). His works have been featured in a range of exhibitions across Australia, and his contributions to contemporary Australian art continue to be celebrated.
