The Art is Everywhere
An ode to the people who make me look at life differently!
I count myself lucky that I am surrounded by so many creative people and a heck of a lot of art in my day-to-day life. It was an accident - what began as being a little helping hand on my gap year evolved into my big girl job as soon as I graduated.
I had little to no interest in fine art. I think I would have categorised lingering in an art gallery as ‘boring’, opting for a cosy afternoon at the cinema instead. My love of film was always the most prominent, and the easiest way for me to connect to the story. I think it’s the combination of writing, performance, music, cinematography - there’s so much in a movie that makes it a masterpiece, and I wasn’t willing to give a painting the chance to give me the same spark.
So, if you’d told me when I was eighteen that I’d spend many a night wandering around at exhibition previews with a glass of something fizzy in my hand asking artists about their processes, I’d have looked at you a little disappointed and thinking you were lying. Life has a funny way of giving us what we need, right?
One of the main things that intimidated me about the world of art was the idea that it could be pretentious. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had plenty of experiences where I’ll be hanging a painting and someone will come along, look at the price and scoff “I could paint better than that.” That art connotes pretentiousness is misjudged, in my opinion. I wonder whether it’s because someone takes pride in their creativity that they’re dismissed in this way - if their talents lay in sport or science, would they be perceived the same? The large majority of artists I meet are just so excited that they can do what they love for money (not always enough to live on) that they don’t even think to be arrogant about it. What radiates is someone who is thrilled by sharing their talent.
The thing that makes me love art the most, though, is that the subject can be anything. There is no right or wrong. A lot of the time, the work I see revolves around the natural: a stormy coastline, a tree blushing with its first blossom of Spring, swans floating balletically on a lake. Sometimes the artist captures a person in a way they’d never thought to look at themselves before. Maybe it’s haunting, or uplifting, or something in between. Some artists paint to shift their feelings, splashing colour on a canvas until their instinct tells them it’s time to put the brush down.
Looking at life through the paintings on the wall makes me see my life in a different way.
Words might be my medium, but I’m struggling to express this point without showing you exactly what I mean. I’m taking it back to primary school and doing a show & tell.
Elevating the average.
This is a piece by an artist I love called Ali Hunter. If you look at Ali’s instagram, it’s full of glimpses inside her sketchbook. She will sit and draw whatever captures her in the moment. In this piece, it’s birds! How wonderful is it to look at ducks waddling around a pond and see stars and hearts floating around? To take a little ball of feathers and decorate them with bursts of pink and red (my favourite colour combination) is to take something we’re used to seeing and rediscover the magic in it.
I went to the beach a couple of days ago and when I saw the seagulls swooping around it was like watching them slip down slides at a funfair. The sky was cloudless and brilliantly blue. It could have been an Ali Hunter painting.
Ali’s paintings always look like energy and love to me. We need to throw more of that at everything.
Embracing every feeling.
Claire Wheeldon is an abstract artist, and if I could I would own ten of her pieces. Her paintings are tactile and textured - paint that crackles, scratches of pencil and colour that spills serendipitously onto the canvas. It’s expressive and effortlessly cool. Claire is also really cool so it makes sense.
I own a piece by Claire that she painted in LA. It’s wistful and romantic and makes me long for summer evenings. Other paintings by Claire are sharper (the ones in the picture are inspired by New York), or soothing, or fun. There’s a painting for every mood.
Art that is emotive or captures mood are especially powerful to me because they demonstrate the breadth of the human experience. Admittedly that sentence may be one of the most pretentious I’ve ever written, but it’s true. If you ever feel alone, there will probably be a piece of art that resonates with you and can alleviate some of the weight of that. It might not be fine art - it could be music or film or writing. The point is, there’s always going to be someone somewhere who has felt the way you do and has made something beautiful out of it.
Basically, the next time you’re feeling like you could spiral into a rage, think about the fact that you could turn the feeling into a masterpiece.
On romanticism.
Jade Fisher is an Australian artist whose work is, in my opinion, the embodiment of romanticising your life. Her botanical pieces are among some of my favourites - I am inexplicably drawn to pastel hues that remind me of sunrises in Spring.
A lot of paintings are of bang average things - in the above painting by Jade Fisher, it’s a jug. Below by Tatiana Alida, a loaf of bread. It’s the fact that they’ve seen these things and thought they were worth capturing that makes them special — it’s the fact that they notice that makes them art.
Jade has a painting of a pot of tea and a cupcake which I’d devour in the space of twenty seconds, but if I took time to stop and pause like Jade I might notice that I’m experiencing a little moment of every day, real life art.
Same goes for Tatiana Alida - if a loaf of bread and butter is worth sketching in charcoals and painting in your finest watercolours (I think lol), then it’s worth enjoying and indulging in every slice.
But it only works if you stop and look at things and consider whether it could be art. Everything can, it just depends on the way you’re framing it.
I could literally bang on about my favourite artists all day and there are soooo many more but I’ll leave you with one more. As a treat.
Patience.
If I ever want to moan about something taking too long I will try and remember that Olivier Leger has been working on a painting for the past few years that will take him another two to complete. Isn’t that crazy? You’ve got to be built different to do that.
If you know Olivier’s work, he concentrates on sea life and each piece is so intricate I’m pretty sure you could stare at it for three hours and not notice everything there is to see. Which brings us to the final cheesy lesson of the article…
good things take time.
ah.
Nothing is ever truly an overnight success. Things take commitment and devotion, persistence and belief.
If you’re saving for a home, building a career brick by brick, learning a new skill, writing a novel, whatever it is - don’t put pressure on yourself to have it completed and perfected by adding a time limit. Things are ready when they’re ready - you wouldn’t eat undercooked chicken, so why would you want anything else before it’s ready for you? Do you see what I mean, or was that gibberish?
Anyhoo - that’s not actually how I planned this piece to go, but I like it all the same. I hope you do, too.
I would love to hear about your favourite artists - I’m always on the lookout for new ones to keep an eye on! They don’t have to be fine artists either, just whatever floats your boat.
"life has a way of giving us what we need" is sooo true! Thanks for sharing these artists -- they're all so talented!! Love artists supporting artists across different mediums :)
I'm currently re-reading one of my favourite non-fiction books, What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye by Will Gompertz. It helped me understand and better appreciate art in an accessible, non-pretentious way!