On 23 September 2025, Estonian Australian artist Merle Lester (née Wiitpom) celebrates her 80th birthday. To mark the milestone, Merle is opening her home on 20 September for friends to drop in and share the occasion. We spoke with Merle about her life, art and the threads that connect them.
Across six decades of practice — and 30 years teaching high-school art — Merle has developed a distinctive visual language: intuitive linework, vibrant colour and textured forms that evoke spirit, memory and the microscopic architectures of life. Her inspirations span Paul Klee (“my favourite artist”), Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, through to Buddhist mandalas and Australian Aboriginal painting — yet the result is unmistakably her own.
Fourteen hours in the icy Baltic Sea
Merle’s family story is one of survival and courage. As the Second World War closed in, her parents Vaike and Adolf Wiitpom fled Tallinn in 1944. Barred from safer routes, they boarded a Red Cross ship to Germany — which was bombed en route. Her mother survived three hours and her father fourteen hours in the icy Baltic Sea before rescue; he was initially presumed dead.
The family spent three years in a German refugee camp while Dresden burned in 1945. Merle was carried — literally — into life in that crucible, before the family arrived in Sydney in 1949.
“I was sad my parents were unable to return from the refugee camp back to their homeland… how different my story would be then.”
“Life was tough as a migrant child,” she remembers. “One tended to hide one’s identity. When I was nine, a school friend’s mother discovered I was born in Germany and refused to let her daughter be my friend. At art school, things changed — people were more tolerant.”
Merle still has relatives in Estonia on her father’s side (one even travelled in Australia on a working-holiday visa in 2013).
Journey as an artist
Merle has been drawing since she was seven. “I love art and loved teaching — to share and encourage others to find their own expression and voice,” she says. A scholarship as an Art Teacher Trainee took her to the National Art School and Alexander Mackie Teachers College (1962–1966). She taught art for three decades, nurturing generations of students while steadily building her own studio practice.
“The world of nature is my inspiration,” she reflects. “My art-making is a form of meditation. I am at peace.”
Her work often meditates on “cellular” and “inner landscape” motifs — pieces such as Cell Division (2016), I Am Here (2018) and Lost in Green (2011), where the unseen structures of life become lyrical abstractions. “My art making flows naturally,” she says.
Home in the Blue Mountains
In 1978, Merle and her husband Barry moved to Kurrajong Heights with their two young children. Together they designed a home with “lots of glass, to incorporate the garden with the house, with a view to Sydney,” and created a four-acre garden that went on to win Grand Champion Spring Garden of the Hawkesbury (2009). “It was a blank canvas and a labour of love,” she recalls.
Merle has two children who share her creative spirit. Her daughter Isabel is a landscape and interior designer, while her son Leon is also an artist. The next generation continues the family’s story — her grandchildren are Annika and Oskar.
In 2002, Merle experienced a stroke; months later, doctors discovered a hole in her heart. The affected brain area could have cost her sight — a near-miss that deepened her commitment to making art.
“A lot of water has passed under the bridge, so to speak,” she says of turning 80. “Turning 80 is like — woh, really. I remember when I turned 8, then 18, 28, 48, 58, 68, 78… now 80.”
Her later body of work emerges from these “second-life” years: art as meditation, mapping and thanksgiving. Her recent exhibition, Meditations from the Heart (June 2025, BigCi, Bilpin), invited visitors into a contemplative journey of spirit and nature set against the dramatic Wollemi National Park.
Though she has lived her life in Australia, Merle’s Estonian roots run deep. Her mother’s family kept a florist shop in Tallinn, where her grandmother made wreaths.
Merle first visited Estonia in 2005 and still treasures that journey. “As a child I could not understand why no one knew where Estonia was — I felt like an alien,” she says. “I was sad my parents were unable to return to their homeland. How different my story would be then. Yes, I have always felt different… However I have embraced Australian culture wholeheartedly.”
Merle sees Estonian influence also in her work: “I feel some of my art reflects Estonian symbols.”
Merle’s life embodies resilience, creativity and quiet strength — from the icy Baltic Sea her parents survived, to the garden she and Barry built in Kurrajong Heights, to the luminous abstractions that invite us into peace.
Merle welcomes personal enquiries about her art. You can contact her directly at merlelester1945[at]gmail.com.
Some of her works can also be viewed online at Saatchi Art.
With thanks
Our warm thanks to Merle Lester for generously sharing her time, memories and insights — and for welcoming us into her world of colour, line and contemplative calm.
Scroll down for a small gallery of Merle’s drawings.
Gallery of Merle’s artworks
