Kerrie’s Creative World

Kerrie Warren with one of her paintings displayed in her studio

Renowned artist Kerrie Warren and two of her Gippsland colleagues, recently collaborated on a wonderful project after she received an Artistic Project Grant last year, funded by the Frankston City Council.

Words & Photos by Wendy Morriss

‘Beneath the Canopies’ is the outcome of their collaboration, which is now being exhibited on the long wall in the Atrium Gallery at Frankston Arts Centre during South Side Festival.

Kerrie, who is an abstract expressionist artist, chose to work with Dr Aunty Eileen Harrison, a Kurnai artist and co-author, and Darryl Whitaker, a professional cinematographer.

“Aunty Eileen and Darryl are people I’ve known for a long time and we’ve worked together before on other projects,” she said. “Our common interest is trees and over time, we have all embraced them as subject matter and as backdrops for visual stories and creative exploration, so we merged our landscapes into the one painting inspired by nature.”

Kerrie’s previous project was painting Dr Aunty Eileen for one of Australia's oldest and most prestigious art awards. “I have never entered the Archibald before because I do predominately work with landscapes but I wanted to have a go. Aunty Eileen and I met for the first time when we shared first prize in an art award and we have been good friends for almost 20 years.

“She agreed to be the subject which was great. The painting wasn’t accepted for the Archibald but it came home and was in The Hidden Faces Exhibition before the Gippsland Art Gallery collected it, so it’s on show at the moment. It’s a lovely outcome, it’s like the painting was always meant to be there.”

Kerrie uses action painting techniques of abstract expressionism to create large scale works that explore humanity’s relationship with nature. Her paintings are wonderful on a screen but seeing them in the real world is an incredibly, rewarding experience. She has an ideal studio in Crossover, West Gippsland and has exhibited in Guangzhou and Jiujiang in China, in New York and Singapore, and along Australia’s Eastern Coast, while her works feature in public and private collections throughout Australia and overseas.

“I feel like I’ve been painting forever, but I haven’t,” she said, “It just feels like it’s always been there. As a child, I wrote reams of poetry and I think what has occurred over time is I have translated all that into paint, which is just a different medium."

“There’s a rhythmic balance within the work that I’m always aiming to achieve. I’m very much a visual worker but then I enjoy words as well. I love the way words sound and even just looking at them and the way they look on a page, I love that balance and composition. I was strangely not allowed to paint and make a mess when I was little but I was allowed to draw and write so it all came out mainly through my poetry. I also work with ceramics and that can merge into sculptures, but I mainly paint.”

Kerrie said she had always wanted to be an artist but didn’t know how to make it a life or a living. She was encouraged to draw and write but never as a job. “People would say, ‘you are a good at drawing but what job are you going to get?’ like that was a whole separate thing, so I worked and wrote poetry at lunch time in my car and worked with pastels at night. It was when someone bought one of my pastels years ago, that made me think maybe I could actually make a living out of doing this, because it was always something I wanted to do.”

Kerrie sold her car and went back to study ceramics, which then led onto other things. “It was a massive release for me especially into the abstract.”

Kerrie’s work space Kerrie’s painting & ceramics displayed in her studio

She could then work a few days a week and support an art studio as well. She said having a job was very handy for a few years until the art became more profitable. The harder she worked the more she was able to invest in it. “Seems like another life now but I did put in many hours working in a job and working as an artist to get there.

“I have explored other ways of working but I’m very much at home as an abstract expressionist. I throw paint onto the surface. I like starting off with that splatter of random dots and then seeing something in it that I can then build on. It’s beginning from a different point to studying something external to myself like flowers and then copying and interpreting that, which is the way I was working as more of a realist painter years ago.

“With abstract painting I find that I can dive into myself and not look outside myself for the subject matter. The best way to describe it is, it’s like the stars in the night sky that are sort of all over the place until your eyes make out the pot or the cross and that’s what I’m doing in the studio. It’s working with all these dots from organic splatters of energy and all of a sudden I’ll see a line where it’s a landscape or a river.”

Kerrie has a love of the land and being in the natural world. She said as a child she stayed on other people’s properties where she was surrounded by wilderness, which is where she feels most at home.

New larger scale painting in the studio

Beneath The Canapes at Frankston Arts Centre – Photo supplied