Featured Artist: Stella Kinsella
I started painting in my 40s joining an art class with Stefan Gevers botanic water colours. I couldn’t draw a lemon and was soon the class under dog. Botanical painting is artful, deft and painstaking - I am none of those things and started working in acrylics, believing oils were for trained artists.
At the time I worked at Melbourne Zoo and painted many animals. I noticed if you stared at a thing for a long time, like a red panda, or a giraffe, or your baby that when it came to painting them there was a kind of muscle memory that kicked in. I also learned that people are much faster to gravitate to your work and encourage your continued practice much more than I’d ever experienced as a professional writer. No one is very enthusiastic when you offer them a screenplay or an unpublished novel as a gift but the gift of portraits and paintings were well received and it flattered me to offer them even if I felt equally trepidatious.
But acrylics, like water colour challenged me and when I was gifted six oil tubes for a birthday present I realised it was time I attempted the medium. I have found oils so much more lithe and forgiving than any other medium and started to create large works of portraits and canvases. I had a few pieces in some group exhibitions which at the time felt like a bucket list box ticked. But I then discovered charcoal attending David Paine’s evening classes. To be honest, I’d only ever really wanted to paint to belong in a room full of easels and cheese and wine and life models. David’s classes fulfilled this wish list and charcoal was the perfect gritty, dirty texture I’d always desired without knowing it. The immediate satisfaction of black and white was simply thrilling.
A year later my personal life went over a cliff and where I had always assumed writing and live performance as my get out of hell card, it was to charcoal I found my respite and started to create big dark monsters that formed the flagstone of an exhibition I committed to and produced at the Louis Joel gallery in Altona. I’m somewhat spent since that show and can’t seem to produce anything I’m happy with since, ( a cautionary tale - never take yourself too seriously) but I very much look forward to a time when I have home and hearth in order again to set up a studio and recommit to large works, and maybe another show, and maybe an Archibald entry and maybe……
At the time I worked at Melbourne Zoo and painted many animals. I noticed if you stared at a thing for a long time, like a red panda, or a giraffe, or your baby that when it came to painting them there was a kind of muscle memory that kicked in. I also learned that people are much faster to gravitate to your work and encourage your continued practice much more than I’d ever experienced as a professional writer. No one is very enthusiastic when you offer them a screenplay or an unpublished novel as a gift but the gift of portraits and paintings were well received and it flattered me to offer them even if I felt equally trepidatious.
But acrylics, like water colour challenged me and when I was gifted six oil tubes for a birthday present I realised it was time I attempted the medium. I have found oils so much more lithe and forgiving than any other medium and started to create large works of portraits and canvases. I had a few pieces in some group exhibitions which at the time felt like a bucket list box ticked. But I then discovered charcoal attending David Paine’s evening classes. To be honest, I’d only ever really wanted to paint to belong in a room full of easels and cheese and wine and life models. David’s classes fulfilled this wish list and charcoal was the perfect gritty, dirty texture I’d always desired without knowing it. The immediate satisfaction of black and white was simply thrilling.
A year later my personal life went over a cliff and where I had always assumed writing and live performance as my get out of hell card, it was to charcoal I found my respite and started to create big dark monsters that formed the flagstone of an exhibition I committed to and produced at the Louis Joel gallery in Altona. I’m somewhat spent since that show and can’t seem to produce anything I’m happy with since, ( a cautionary tale - never take yourself too seriously) but I very much look forward to a time when I have home and hearth in order again to set up a studio and recommit to large works, and maybe another show, and maybe an Archibald entry and maybe……