Returning to Paint

The first and most common question I am asked when people visit my studio is ‘How long have you been painting?’. It’s a question without a straightforward answer. Both ‘Forever’ and ‘Less than a year’ are true.

I’ve always been an artist in some way or another – I started out the way most do, with finger paints in bold colours and bright felt tip markers which I smattered across any surface I could. Even then, I was creating portraits – strange and unwittingly Cronenberg-esque versions of my family and pets. These tools evolved into a rudimentary watercolour set and some poster paints at some point during my Primary School years. It was around this time that my sister and I created an underwater scene to be hung in the bathroom (it was opportunistically put in the back of a cupboard and forgotten about when we moved house not long after) – she did the fish and I painted the deep-sea diver, waving through the page, and the passengers sat inside the (yes, Beatles-inspired) yellow submarine.

It was at Secondary School that I was introduced to acrylics – the medium I still use today. In fact, I use the same brand (System 3) that my school gave us. Some might say that I take ‘love the one you’re with’ a little too seriously. In our weekly art lessons I used these paints when I could but they were few and far between – reserved mostly for the older kids who had exams to pass and not the eleven year olds creating the same Cubist-inspired still-lifes ad infinitum. I mostly relied on pens – forever using my leaky biros to scribble faces in the margins of my schoolwork. It got to the point that my French teacher suggested that, if I wouldn’t stop doodling, I could at least bring a separate sheet of paper with me to draw on, rather than doing it all over my work. I had thought that my artistic additions might have been appreciated but, hey, everyone’s a critic.

It was for my GCSE Art, aged fourteen, that I picked up paints again, trying my hand at bold Pop Art pieces and (much to my teenage pretentious pleasure) Early Netherlandish inspired triptychs.

I feel, since I’m on the subject of GCSE Art, that I should really mention my teacher, Ms Barlow, who, on our final day, with her and our entire class in floods of tears, reintroduced herself to us by her first name, as our friend. She was the sort of teacher who did everything she could within the constraints of state school art budgets, class lengths and class sizes. She wrote us all individual letters on our last day telling us what she loved about our art – and us; she brought in her own books from home to teach each of us about artists and movements that could work for our individual studies (you think my fourteen-year-old self would have stumbled onto Early Netherlandish art on my own?!); she told us – sometimes a little harshly – what needed improving. She was great to the point where a bunch of grumpy fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds knew she was great. I’ve tried looking her up to tell her all this myself several times over the past few years but haven’t had any luck. But, hey, Ms Barlow, if you stumble upon this one day, please say hello!

After my GCSEs, I moved onto Sixth Form College. For those not in the UK, this is basically a two-year steppingstone between school and university. It’s a new place, with no uniforms but lots of new people, new classes and new teachers, who you call by their first name. In the case of my college, it had over 3,000 pupils and more classes than I could care to count. Unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately, because, had I not taken that paths I did, I may not be where I am today) it was at this time, aged 17, that I gave up on art.

College taught me a lot about myself in two short years. Primarily, it was where I first realised that my desperate need to overachieve was not necessarily a good thing. While most kids start with four A-levels in their first year and cut down to three in their second, I took five and continued them all. On top of that, I got a weekend job, and took on what was known then as the ‘Extended Project’ which was essentially a dissertation and, effectively, an extra subject. I, of course, took Art which, for anyone who has taken A-Level Fine Art will attest, is a work-heavy subject. I was staying up ‘til the early hours each morning drawing and painting, sleeping for a few hours and then waking up at 6am to get ready for college. On top of this, I was no longer a big fish in a relatively small pond. The classes were bigger and full of people with striking talent and fresh ideas. In essence, I was working my arse off and I wasn’t even close to being what I perceived as good enough. I no longer enjoyed creating. I was a little painting zombie, a sad hunched over creature balancing canvases on my knee and the edge of my beside table, working in the dull blueish light from my laptop screen as not to alert my mother to my late night activities by turning the lights on. Some kids sneak out, some take drugs, I stayed up too late doing homework.

I remember the day I realised that art just wasn’t working for me anymore. I was 17 and about five minutes into my mock English exam. I recall writing away as quickly as I could and I was sniffling, which was odd as I didn’t have a cold. After a few minutes I wiped my nose with the back of my hand (yes, gross, I know), and when I took it away, my hand was red. It was then that the floodgates opened, and blood began to pour from my nose like a tap had been turned on. I stood quickly from my desk and the room spun. I managed to make it out of the room with the help of another classmate and, once in the hallway, I crumpled. Turns out, when they say teenagers should get between eight and ten hours of sleep per night, they don’t mean ‘Unless you’re Ellie and then three hours is fine’.

For those wondering, I was allowed to re-join the exam with about eight minutes left spare. I ended up writing in the top righthand corner: Had to leave because nosebleed :( hoping that this would allow me some leeway. Nope. Got a D. Looking back, I can see that, considering I only had about fifteen minutes to complete the exam, a D was actually a bit of an achievement, but you try telling that to an overly competitive teenager running on three hours of sleep and a vending machine hot chocolate.

It was at this time that I decided that I was not going to pursue art past college. I felt like I was done with it, maybe forever. I submitted my applications to several universities to study English and Creative Writing. I finished my art A-Level with several large portraits and then that was it. I didn’t paint again for nine years.*

*Bar three sad attempts.

I felt the pull of art occasionally throughout my time at university. For both my undergraduate and my master’s degrees, my dissertations studied the link between written text and visual imagery. I created the images myself, sometimes through photography but more often with pens; I had found myself doodling faces in the margins of my notes with my biros during lectures. It’s with hindsight now that I see that people have always been my focus, whether painted on canvasses, or scrawled on lined paper bending themselves around my messy handwriting. And, looking back at these old portraits, I’m realising that it’s always been women at the centre of it all. Women’s faces appearing on pages and looking back at me. Women all the way down. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After my master’s, I floundered. I excelled at university. I was in small classes again and, in my master’s in particular, I was the proverbial big fish. But as suddenly as academic clarity had come, I graduated and was out in the real world again. I had a lot of ideas. I was going to get my PhD and teach. But for this I needed money. So I got a job. And then I got another job. And the years passed fast underneath me and suddenly I was hitting the middle of my twenties and I’d done nothing; all I had to show for the years were some sad sketchy faces I’d been absentmindedly making in my limited spare time. I found that that old familiar tugging was still in there – the same one that had me painting underwater scenes and staying up until 3am painting in soft blue light. I wanted to create again, to make faces appear with my hands. I was in a predicament that many people in their twenties faced, however. I was a renter. Renting meant painting in the flat was a no-go. That’s not to say that I didn’t try. I did rent a little studio for a time – a tiny unheated room annexed on a carpenter’s workshop about a mile or so from where I lived. I painted a grand total of three self-portraits before winter arrived and the hilly walk there and home through the cold and the dark after long days of work just became too much. The studio became storage for a bit and then I had to admit defeat and give it up. Those three portraits ended up in a giant skip at the city’s recycling centre.

By this time, however, the fire to create was well-lit in me again. I bought a large sketchbook and a 20-pack of Bic biros and started to draw.

And then I created my Instagram account.

I’m aware that it may sound silly, but Instagram genuinely changed my life. It provided the validation that the aching overachiever in me required and it gave me a community. I kept up with it, posting my drawings regularly for a couple of years to slowly growing audience and then, in 2020, my partner and I bought a house. The timing was a little odd; our offer on the house was agreed in February, two weeks before covid hit and we eventually fully moved in six weeks before the UK locked down again for the second wave. It was in this time, in late October 2020, that I finally finished unpacking. (Okay, cards on the table, I still haven’t fully finished unpacking, but at this point those boxes are just going to stay sealed until we eventually move again one day and their contents will be a fun surprise – assuming that nothing in them was perishable, in which case it will be a fairly horrid surprise.) Dusty and mostly forgotten, I found my old paints and some strung out brushes. And so, on a chilly and rainy October afternoon, I returned to paint. I created the portrait ‘Autumn’ which, to this day, is still one of my most popular – and highest print-selling – pieces. The next day I painted another portrait. And another the day after that. And it just kept going. Women’s faces pouring out of me onto pages. Faces on faces on faces.

It’s strange to look back on the last year, now being in October once again, having gone from opening my paints for the first time in years to now working as a full-time portraitist, in a lovely studio surrounded by other artists and with my walls adorned by the faces of women I’ve painted. They look at me and I look at them; they surround me on all sides as I work and create new sisters for them. They feel oddly protective, enclosing around me – they look out for me, and I look out for them. I take them to exhibits and share them online. I like to imagine that stepping into my studio is like stepping into a matriarchy; women all the way down.

So, how long have I been painting? I’ve worked this all out in words and I still don’t really know the answer.

Not long. My whole life.