In the last few years, there has been a major rebalance at play, as institutions globally have adjusted their collection holdings, exhibition programs and publishing initiatives to give greater voice and visibility to women artists.
Joining that line-up, is the recently released coffee table book, Artists at Home, by author and photographer Karina Dias Pires. While the book is what you would expect – lavishly glossy and flip-friendly – it also neatly corrals together 32 female Australian artists, under the shared discussion of their studio practice and the impact of ‘home’ on their making.
Managing a home, and often a family, can add another layer of challenges to women artists. In an October panel discussion for the launch of the publication, artists Louise Olsen, Karen Black and Zoe Young shared how they approach some of those hurdles, and the choices they have made to get the balance right.
A career shift, and how ‘home’ played a role
Both Louise Olsen and painter Karen Black described having substantial demanding ‘other’ careers, before allowing themselves to take the milestone sidestep, and nurture their own creative practice.
While Olsen has always been creative through her internationally celebrated design company, Dinosaur Designs, which she started with husband Stephen Ormandy after meeting on the first day at art school (National Art School) in the mid 1980s, it has only been in the last few years that she has made a strategic commitment to her painting practice.
The trigger was taking her painting studio out of the Dinosaur Designs headquarters, and locating it alongside her father’s studio (the celebrated Australian painter John Olsen) in the Southern Highlands, in regional Australia.
‘I think having the studio at my dad’s place was a real turning point because I had that quiet space… [and] he is just so wonderful to talk to, to discuss painting,’ said Olsen during the panel discussion.
Sitting between the two Olsen studios is the kitchen, a neutral place where ideas can be shared.
‘I have quite a busy life in Sydney, as well as a busy design business, and it’s so lovely to come here and just have that peace and quiet. I usually drive down on Friday and Tuesday morning head back to Sydney.’
She added: ‘I feel like that really opened the door.’
Read: Why pausing your artistic calling might not be such a bad idea
The home environment offered Olsen a creative sanctuary. In contrast, the balance of home and work was a challenge for Karen Black in the early days of her career transition.
Black worked as a costume designer with various opera companies for many years before turning to her studio practice as a painter. The trigger was having her first child, and feeling the pressure of long work hours in the juggle.
On first taking on costume work at home, she recalled: ‘[They’d say] we’ve got these 25 chorister costumes, and they’d send me all the measurements… So I ended up [with a home studio] where I had all these pins and needles and scissors everywhere, and I had a little baby. And then I’m thinking, “this is actually not going to work”.
‘So I threw it in the air. I had to really give up my practice for probably about eight years. I had two children, but I did night classes in Italian painting, and got other skills up. And then when the kids were old enough to make their own Vegemite sandwiches, I thought maybe I could just start getting out a little bit more.’
Black said she vacillated about the idea of how to ‘go forward with two children and have a career in something’ – eventually turning to painting.
For a while, the two blurred as she found her footing. ‘I think in the early days, all the figures in my paintings wore costumes, and I used to see the paint colour as fabric… It’s only more recently I’ve been undressing [them] and talking about the body underneath.’
Zoe Young’s journey was different again. She was brought up in a creative home environment, and at 17 gave art school a stab. But it lasted only a matter of weeks before she packed her bags and left ‘home’ literally – becoming an itinerant worker overseas.
‘I became a bit overwhelmed as to what would be the point in being an artist, and I was even thinking it would be so much easier if I was a guy … all the drawings from those times used to have the idea of coming up with different alter egos of artists because I think I just never had the belief that I was interesting enough as a person to actually be an artist, [that] I didn’t fit that mould,’ explained Young.
She lived in Bangkok, had a millinery studio in Amsterdam and cleaned yachts in Phuket – which she describes as, her ‘sliding doors moment of, “Do I want to keep travelling and making ends meet, pushing my luck? Or do I want to do something more?”’
It was actually the success of her first solo exhibition in Thailand that saw her return ‘home’ to Australia, and approach a gallery for representation.
‘I remember going into Ray Hughes Gallery in Sydney and I [said], “I’m here and I want a show”. They were really polite [saying], “Do you think maybe you need to refine your practice?” [My response was], “What are you talking about?”, and I remember sort of storming out of there.’
That rejection saw Young return the National Art School. ‘It was a blessing to go back,’ she explained.
While Young studied sculpture at art school (with no money, she was able to ‘basically make stuff out of junk’), she says that her paintings today have more of a connection to her home environment growing up.
The impact of growing up with creativity in the home
Young’s parents were restaurateurs and hoteliers, and her first seven years were spent growing up on the ski fields.
‘Once service started I was allocated a table for the evening with my pencils, and that’s pretty much where my relationship with drawing began. I think my dad realised a set of pencils was a lot cheaper than an au pair,’ said Young.
‘We had lots of really interesting people around, same as Louise, coming through the place to stay as guests.
‘I really started getting very serious about drawing was when I was 14. So I went to Melbourne Grammar, which at the time, and still does now, [have] a very sophisticated art school. So when I was doing drawing there, I was doing graphic design and technical design. I was very privileged to have that education from such a young age. And then, when I enrolled at the National Art School after that experience, people didn’t have those skills.’
Karen Black’s formative years were also framed by exposure to technical drawing processes. She grew up in a house that was full of wood shavings – her father was a furniture maker and master craftsman, who also taught.
Black remembers his students’ marquettes bumping around for use in making, and rolls of blueprint technical drawings as just part of everyday life. ‘We used to get all that paper afterwards to draw on, so we’d be drawing on the paper my dad was marking,’ said Black, confessing that even in her early days her father could not curb her abstract tendencies.
It is not surprising, then, that Black explained how she has shared the joy of drawing with children. For a number of years she has volunteered in Syria and Turkey, taking with her a suitcase of art materials, recognising the value of creative expression at a young age, especially its impact in cases of trauma.
‘When I came back to Australia, I did some workshops with [refugee] children the same age, but they just didn’t have the same thing,’ she said of that natural non-schooled expression, adding that she observed a significant different between access to art making and materials, ‘when you take it for granted and when it’s not available to you.’
It is a point Young also made. ‘I pulled the modem out of the wall for my kids as an experiment two weeks ago, and I just noticed the immense creativity, and how the social flow of things changed dramatically. I guess that’s something that’s fascinated me.’
Young continued: ‘When you grew up with that environment, you bring that in [to] our kids’ [lives] as well. It’s how we can start relating to different generations.’
Young said she is grateful and privileged to have had a creative childhood, and explained that her paintings today have more of a connection to her home environment growing up. ‘I’m really inspired by, and I feel myself returning to, at the Arts and Crafts movement as a mum with young children. I grew up in beautiful interiors, and Mum always has William Morris wallpaper throughout the house. So I’m very comfortable in nature, and in the designs of designers such as William Morris.
‘I was able to study the Arts and Crafts movement through sculpture, and how William Morris and that movement arose. And, basically, it’s a rejection of industrialisation. And I can feel myself using an environment for the rejection of digitalisation.’
Louise Olsen was similarly nurtured into a creative environment at an early age, where nature was a key protagonist.
She grew up with not only both parents as artists and teachers in their own right, but also with a house full of creative peers – fellow painters, musicians and gallerists.
‘Dad had his studio and then my mum had her studio in the spare room, and there was always the smell of turpentine in the air,’ said Olsen. ‘Both my parents started the art school called The Bakery, which was in Paddington. So after school we’d end up at the art school from a very early age.
‘There was always something to draw. There was always a brush or charcoal, some pencils, there was always paper to draw on. It was a constant creative hub. And there was always a lot of creative people coming and going – writers, musicians. I feel very blessed to have had that.’
All three artists skirt a genre that sits between landscape or figuration and abstraction. Olsen said those early days of walking through nature continue to inform her painting today, distilled to the most simple gestures and haikus.
For Young, her paintings are often of domestic interiors – still lifes scattered with the nuances of home.
This conversation was presented at Ngununggula, the Southern Highlands Regional Art Gallery – in regional Australian – on the occasion of the launch of the publication, Artists at Home (Thames and Hudson).
