Nellie Windmill

Some things these past two weeks of travel, upheaval, meeting new people and old, have clarified:

• I feel despondent when I’ve been away from the studio for too long
• I feel adrift when my routine has been de-railed
• How I feel about the worthiness of my work is a fickle thing unworthy of my trust. Read the rest of this entry »

Inspired by this starkly honest post by an artist after my own heart, Valeria Chua, I’ve decided it’s confession time.

Sometimes, I struggle with painting so much I don’t enjoy it.

Then, I feel guilty about not enjoying it. Read the rest of this entry »

I’d like to give you permission to not share your artwork with friends and family. Not that it’s in my power to grant, but if it makes you feel better you can go ahead and pretend it is. During a conversation with a writer friend the other day I admitted to not even showing my partner finished pieces a lot of the time. Read the rest of this entry »

I love a good end of year wrap-up post, don’t you? The inspiration for this blog post came from Megan Auman of Designing an MBA and her post, “The 3 Best Things I Did For My Business in 2011″. 2011 was a tipping point year for my art so I thought I’d run with the theme. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m already struggling with the lack of light as we hurtle towards winter. Between this and other life stuff my productivity has been absolutely rubbish lately. As the days get shorter, I find I’m having to get very intentional about time in the “studio”. Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then, I write a post with a list of things I wish somebody had told me as a newbie artist. If I never say anything on this topic again, I’ll be satisfied that I have at least shared this, because this one’s a woppa. I absolutely wish someone had told me this. Not right away. Maybe at that point when I’d been creating long enough to be hooked and determined to learn, yet a little Read the rest of this entry »

The exquisite beauty of Lauren Gray’s art makes me ache. A while back, I wrote about how It would hurt to look at beautiful things I didn’t create in the days before I had found my way back to art making. I’m pretty sure if I had’ve lain eyes on the artwork of Lauren Gray during this time I would have torn asunder. I want to touch them, and smell them and hang them somewhere I will see every single day. I have a dear little list of artists whose original work I look forward to collecting when I have a house again and Lauren Gray shot to the top of that list as soon as I set eyes on her figurative work. Read the rest of this entry »

Way back in February, I posted a few lessons I’ve learned as a self-taught artist. I thought I’d make a regular thing of it so when I’m a wizened granny I can look back on these posts and laugh incontinently at how young and dumb I was. Here is my hard-earned wisdom, gained betwixt the months of February and May:

• Mistakes and difficulties are the birthplaces of new creative techniques. The veracity of this statement is probably more a testament to the breadth of my mistakes and difficulties than anything else. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re unfamiliar with glazing, it’s when you build up a painting with multiple transparent layers of colour, or glazes. When I initially began learning how to paint I wasn’t at all interested in learning about the traditional techniques. I thought there’d be a bunch of “rules” that would constrain rather than inspire. However, one of the ways I direct my learning is by teaching myself how to do something that I’ve admired in another’s painting. A technique that I keep seeing pop up time and again is glazing. I’d like to share some of the artwork that has inspired me to one day explore this great traditional technique.

Amy and Romain Torrente

All rights reserved – Amy and Romain Torrente

Heather Haynes

All rights reserved – Heather Haynes

Seth Fitts

All rights reserved – Seth Fitts

Perrine Boyer

All rights reserved – Perrine Boyer

I’m currently working on a piece that I’m really excited about. I think I’m finding my style. I also feel really satisfied with my technique in this piece as well, which is new. Until now, I felt like I was wrestling with the materials. I was frustrated that when I attempted to illustrate the pictures in my mind, the materials would get in the way rather than help me bring it to life. With this painting, I feel like I’m reaching the tipping point. Not only are the materials helping to realise the concept, they’re making it much more interesting and beautiful than it was in my head.

As most of you probably know, I’m currently living in a motorhome as I travel around Europe with my partner. This, combined with the fact that I’m not yet selling my paintings means that finished pieces mostly end up in a cupboard. I’m so smitten with my last two paintings and this one on the way, that I can’t bear to deal them such a fate. One of them is adorning the only wall that is painting-friendly in Nettle, but the other two are going to have to find good homes. This is a pretty exciting turn of events but I’m not sure what it means, as I still don’t feel ready to open an Etsy shop.

What I do know is that I plan to focus on these particular techniques and this colour palette for a while and see where they take me!

When you’re learning something new, there are always a few things you learn down the track that make you think, “I wish somebody told me that at the beginning”. I’m still very much learning myself, but I have gotten to the stage where I’ve accumulated some of those “nice to know at the beginning” things. Here’s a list of the things that have rocked my world to date, and I’ll be sure to update you with more epiphanies as they come.

• It’s all about layers — if in doubt, add another layer
• Learn the basics — after I bought a couple of intro to acrylics books, I began enjoying painting so much more because some problems I was having that were threatening my sanity were solved. Such as:
  • Paint drying too quickly? Add a smidge of clear glaze medium or use a wet palette. A wet palette is a tray with a wet sponge in it. On top of the sponge sits a piece of palette paper. A godsend, this one!
  • Getting a streaky look with visible brush marks when you’re aiming for smooth and “brushless”? Use several layers of thin paint with a watercolour brush
• You can make paint thinner, thicker, transparent or opaque — there’s no need to buy another tube of paint in a shade you already have because you’re after one of these attributes. Buy heavy bodied acrylics, which you can easily thin, and learn a couple of techniques for making opaque paint transparent and transparent paint opaque. “Acrylic Revolution” by Nancy Reyner is an excellent resource for this and many other things.
• You know how sometimes nothing’s going right and you think to yourself, “if I was actually any good at this, this wouldn’t be so hard”? Artists you admire go through this too! On the same day, I read this blog post and this tweet:

That was a good, good day. These days, I’m much kinder to myself.

I’d love to hear your “nice to know at the beginning things”. We could make a community resource that will save beginner artists everywhere from maddening frustration and self-doubt!

Have I mentioned I never wanted to be an artist when I grew up? I don’t think it ever actually occurred to me that it was an option. Even today, I struggle with truly believing it is an option, despite knowing full well that people do it. This puts me in mind of the TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson. He contends, “We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it… You were probably steered benignly away from things at school, things you liked, on the grounds that you wouldn’t be able to get a job doing that”. I absolutely chose subjects in school based on their correlation with employability. I studied Japanese instead of Italian and did math and not art in VCE (the final two years in high school). If I were to be put with those same choices today, my decisions would be reversed.

I thought I had sussed out what the artistically inclined can do with their skills when I first encountered the subject of graphic design — they make logos! That was the nail in the coffin for my creative career (that and discovering you had to do maths to be an architect). I didn’t even take the subject.

I don’t actually regret not following a creative career from the get-go, however. I think creating puts one in an extremely vulnerable place and quite frankly, I just wasn’t ready. I would have been eaten alive at art school; crumbled at the first critique.

Just over a year ago, I tentatively spoke of my desires for a creative career to my partner. I posted a list of dreams in January last year, which included my very first arty career goals. At some point, I edited the description on my About page from “wannabe artist” to “budding artist”; a hesitant step, which at the same time feels quite bold and actually makes me cringe a little at my own audacity! Despite this, I still don’t feel like I’ve come out and said it. I really do believe that:

“…The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.”

- JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

In my mind this is something akin to saying “you make your own luck” or as I once heard someone say, “the harder I worked the luckier I got”. So I’m just going to come out and say it: When I grow up, I want to be an artist! I want my paintings and illustrations to be licensed by super cool businesses like Gelaskins and La Marelle . I want my illustrations to be on funky cushions and clothes and bags. I want my paintings to adorn the walls of a cafe I adore. I want to create an iDevice/Mac game with my partner using my illustrations, like the beautiful Machinarium. How frivolous, how audacious! I’m not sure if I could say this out loud, to your face — I’d be far too embarrassed for that. That’s a whole other blog post…

Have you ever been really into something and then found out that there are other things like this something and that there’s a name for this stuff and lots of other people like this stuff too? If that sentence didn’t make any sense to you don’t worry about it, the rest of this blog post doesn’t require that you’re orbiting the same celestial body as me to understand it.

I recently discovered that the type of art (apart from mixed media) that makes my heart go thump has a name and its name is “pop surrealism“. Apparently it’s a bit of a misnomer, and hotly contested by some of those upon whom the label is foisted, but it’s a revelation nonetheless.

I met two art students whilst on our journeys in Tunisia who asked me what “art movement” I consider my paintings to belong to. I told them I don’t get that academic about it and said I just paint cute stuff that’s kind of creepy, which left them looking at me blankly. Little did I know this cute and creepy stuff is apparently a valid (to some) art movement.

This discovery happily coincided with a visit to Rome, which happens to be the home of the Dorothy Circus Gallery that sells prints of one of my favourite artists of this style – Nicoletta Ceccoli. It had never occurred to me that art with a focus on strange and innocent yet disturbing subjects could be found in a gallery. T-shirts from Dangerfield maybe, but certainly not galleries as I knew them. This discovery has opened up a whole new wonderfully macabre and seedy world.

I’m at the stage in the evolution of my art where every painting is a learning exercise. In fact, I suspect even seasoned artists would say as much in a steal-my-thunder kinda way but I think my curve is much steeper. As an artist I’m so green that the new art and artists I’m constantly encountering online result in me frenziedly attempting a different style of painting every week. So far I’ve tried Wabi Sabi, abstract landscapes, steampunk, mixed media, artography, and oil painting. This leaves me feeling kind of exhilarated and somewhat unauthentic at the same time. Most of the time I’ll notice an element of a painting I like and try to replicate it with my limited skill set. If you haven’t already guessed, the above painting was inspired by Kelly Rae Roberts’ trademark patchwork collages and messy brayered backgrounds. Intellectually I know that it’s not copying, it’s imitation as a learning exercise. I remember seeing art students sitting in front of masterpieces at the Louvre and sketching them presumably for the very same reason.

However, I, like many people, have hang-ups when it comes to making art. There’s a little voice in my head that sometimes suggests that if I can’t render bowls of fruit photo-realistically or if I’m not being a wacko who does weird shit with stuff then I’m not really an artist and I certainly shouldn’t have to develop a style. I suspect a lot of people stop making art or never begin for similar insecurities. There are a lot of practical philosophies that hold as true for art making as they do for life that I can fall back on at this point and placate such insecurities. Enjoying the process and not being in a rush to get to the end is a good one. Another one is that nothing worth doing is easy. Both rock solid, clichéd, but rock solid. However, the one thing that gives me an instant dose of concrete certainty that I am doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing is remembering how I felt about art when I wasn’t making it. It hurt to look at beautiful things I didn’t create. They gave me a deep-down emotional ache. They made me feel intensely jealous of the person who created it. A particularly exquisitely sexy piece of eye candy could even make me angry in an upset kind of way. For anyone out there who doesn’t know what to do with their lives, doesn’t know what their passion is, think of the thing that makes you feel like that and go out and do it. I suppose this is kind of the dark side of the “do what excites you” coin – “do what pisses you off because you’re not doing it”. No matter what insecurities come up for me in my art making from here on out, it doesn’t matter, because I wield their kryptonite.