How I Became An Artist
Five years ago, only those closest to me would have known I was an artist. Even then, it was more talk than action.
I was a journalist at The Australian Financial Review, where I’d worked for 21 years until I was tossed into the scrap heap along with hundreds of other writers, photographers, artists, cartoonists and sub-editors in one of many rounds of retrenchments.
I was incredibly lucky. Not only had I already started to mentally prepare to become a freelancer, my husband, Peter, has his own thriving PR consultancy and the family was not dependant on my income to get by. I put the lions’ share of the redundancy payment into my daughter’s school fees, kept a little aside as “running away money” and jumped straight into the freelance world for the first time.
Again, fortune smiled upon me. Because I had been writing in the same area of management and leadership for a long time, I had offers of freelance work immediately … and my running away money is still in my bank account to pay for things I’d otherwise have to argue with Peter about.
Perhaps the biggest stroke of fortune, however, was the fact that I already had another identity that I had been working on. So many people who lose their jobs and whole careers in retrenchment have to deal with the loss of relevance – if I am not my job, if I don’t have this big brand name behind me, then who am I? Yes, I am also a mother, a wife and a daughter. Those things are important, but there was another part of me that had been neglected for a long time … and I had started to pay some attention to that.
In 2014, I had enrolled in art classes under the formidable Kerrie Lester – a loud, extravagantly opinionated woman, who was one of Australia’s best-known artists. She was also an inspired teacher. I attended her classes for a year, before she had to give up teaching to battle an illness that ended up killing her.
It had been 20 years since I had wielded a paintbrush. I’d stopped painting in my late 20s, when I returned from a year’s backpacking overseas with a $10,000 debt, a Turkish rug and a belief that I needed to make a “sensible” choice between art and a journalism career. It was a silly binary decision that I wouldn’t make today, but back then, I was about to turn 30 and I was conscious that I needed to think about my financial security.
Before making that unnecessary decision, I had been dividing my time between journalism and art school. I’d spent a couple of years as a casual at Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, working six days a week and cramming in day classes at the Julian Ashton art school when I had night shifts. Later, I spent two or three years at the Manly Daily, taking the ferry over to The Rocks for art classes on the weekends. Those Manly Daily years were glorious. Living and working in Manly, starting at 9.30 am and finishing when the presses started at 4 pm, walking home via the beach. It’s a shame that while I was there, I was impatient to get back to the “big time” instead of appreciating what I had.
“ “In all the years of taking a million photos of the kids and everything else I had been doing, I had continued to hone my skills, to sharpen my eye. “”
So, I poured my energy into journalism and joined the Financial Review. I also poured lots of energy into having and raising a family. I remember listening to an interview with the director of the National Art Gallery, Betty Churcher, a talented artist in her own right, who talked about the challenges facing mothers who are artists. Children, she said, suck the creativity right out of you. I know what she meant. Mothering leaves very little time and energy for creative endeavour. Kerrie Lester used to talk about how she brought up her two boys as a single mother and would be in the doorway of the kitchen, stirring the pot on the stove with one hand while continuing to paint with the other. She also developed her signature stitching style, sewing around the outlines of her figures, because it gave her something productive to do while attending her boys’ swimming carnivals.
With me, my creative impulses leaked out in all sorts of minor ways. I took a lot of photographs. I doodled constantly. I went through a stage where I made beaded jewellery, and stayed up late into the night buying glass and semi precious beads from all over the world. I got tired of that, and then started decorating rocks. I made elaborate sand sculptures with the children. I cut up my old paintings to make gift cards.
When I started painting again, I thought I would have to relearn everything but I was wrong. In all the years of taking a million photos of the kids and everything else I had been doing, I had continued to hone my skills, to sharpen my eye. From the moment I picked up my brushes in Lester’s class, I think I was better than I had ever been. Which is not to say that I didn’t still have a hell of a lot to learn, but I hadn’t gone backwards.
Coming back to painting was like coming back to an important part of myself. But, as fate would have it, it was also my salvation. The year I joined art classes, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. We were very close and the diagnosis was devastating to me. Before she died she was ill for a year and I don’t know how I would have dealt with her death if I hadn’t poured my heart into painting.
My mother was an artist as well. She had started as a potter, then turned to photography, calligraphy and, finally, became a papermaker. She made boxes and books and installations out of paper made from native grasses, photographs, inks, knots, beads and paint.
Once a week, I would drive over to Mum and Dad’s place with my latest work in progress and we could talk about that, instead of having to focus on her illness all the time. She was a tough critic, never gave a compliment lightly. I knew when I started getting unqualified praise that she was getting really sick.
When she died, I had been painting for a year. Everything then was about holding on. About trying to capture and keep the things and people that I love. I have a dreadful memory. Really bad. Not quite Dory from Finding Nemo, but getting there. But I discovered that, when I painted from memory, I could pull out details that I had thought had been lost. What our first house looked like, what my parents wore, how I felt. It was precious. Painting became a process of embedding and celebrating those things I felt were important.