Time and Presence, by Leoni Duff, has been six months in the making and even longer if you count the time it took to settle on a concept to bring the work together.

Duff said she was always thinking about what her motivation as a painter was while putting the exhibition together.

"It's a wide range of subject matter, but the theme of what I do is what life is all about. The beauty of life and the difficulty of life and the intensity of it all," she said.

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"The exhibition title is a kind of broader philosophical statement, in a way, that life is rich, intense, and often very difficult. Each painting is a reflection of one of those aspects of life."

Duff enjoys working with charcoal where possible, finding it a beautiful and expressive medium. However, she also uses pastels to create lively work and oil for her oil on canvas works.

"I guess what I like people to do when they stand in front of a painting is engage with it at a top-level ... but then to start to think more deeply about the issues of life," she said.

The Launceston artist has a studio in the city that she teaches at on Tuesdays, then works out of from Wednesday-Friday each week.

"I'm fairly structured [with my time]. It's like going to work and there's always something I am working on," Duff said.

"I tend to always be looking for great ideas which would be good to express like a piece of visual poetry."

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With 20 paintings in the hang at Gallery Pejean, there is a lot to take in and explore through Duff's work.

"I never think about the audience when I'm painting or earning money from it. I just always think about the visual poetry and what I'm saying," she said.

"As an artist you need inspiration and it's ideas that inspire me rather than beautiful things."

Duff started within the music industry and treated visual art as a hobby for many years, but decided to embrace the genre in her 40s.

"I think if you put your heart into [art] and you do it with passion and a commitment to doing it as well as you can, it tends to have its own life," she said.

For those who have enjoyed Duff's previous work in the Glover Prize, she may be spotted on the walls again in the future if she finds a concept that works for the award.

"I guess my overarching motivation [to my art] is that I have a strong world view, I'm a Christian. My world view is that there is something far greater beyond what we see," Duff said.

Time and Presence will show at the gallery until October 23. It will be followed by a group exhibition titled Still Life Or Is It? from October 25 - November 27, and a summer showcase from November 29 - January 22.

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