Kerry Anne Sullivan's Fine Art Studio

My Amazing Journey in Art from a Farmer’s wife in the Mallee to Kerry Anne’s Fine Arts Gallery in Toorak, Melbourne, Australia

Journey

My Amazing Journey in Art from a Farmer’s wife in the Mallee to Kerry Anne’s Fine Arts Gallery in Toorak, Melbourne, Australia

I was born in the Mallee in the tiny bush town of Hopetoun. My family had farmed in the Mallee for many years.  When I was five we moved again to a farm, a dairy farm, and from then on life got tough. However, I was a dreamer and the land was in my soul.  I am sure that is why later in life, so many of the early Heidelberg School paintings resonated strongly with me. I always loved colour and colouring-in but in my early life, art influences were nil, but I loved to draw on the edge of whatever paper I could get. In addition, my mother was an exquisite dress designer who made all our clothes she too had an excellent eye for colour combinations in dress materials and fashion, and I believe that was unconsciously passed onto me.

The land around me has always been my canvas so drawing literally on the land, in the dust, was a favourite pastime.  I was born with a severe autoimmune disease that remained undiagnosed until adulthood. As well I was extremely dyslexic with severe myopia.  So when I was finally given glasses at the age of 12 a whole new world of distance opened up for me.  At long last I could see faces, people, leaves on treetops and distant blue hills. I was in heaven but because I saw things, only in blurry shapes which were identifiable by my best friend, colour. So as life trundled on and I began to hear about art and I could now see properly I became more enamoured with the wildlife, nature and the seasonally changing in terms of colour. However, suffice to say, because I could now see details, particularity and detail became more important in my drawings.  Years later, when I went to boarding school I wanted to do Art as a subject in high school. But, I was unable to, because, in the whole school, I was the only girl in years 11 and 12 who wanted to study art.  At the end of Year 12, my exam results were good enough to be awarded a scholarship to La Trobe University where I completed a Teaching Degree, specialising in art.

Long story short many long years later after going back to the Mallee to teach, I married a local farmer and had three children. The progression of my autoimmune disease together with violent bouts of domestic violence over a period of 22 years saw me turn, in my darkest days and during the long nights, to my drawing and my art. Each Tuesday I went to the mobile library in our little town and struggle out of it with as many art books as I could carry. I poured over these books, day and night absorbing every detail minute detail of past and present artists’ paintings. I helped run the local art show for a number of years and eventually, I began to paint, firstly in acrylics and then oils and I loved it.  I had gotten the painting bug and it never left me.  I felt I had something that I was able to do so well and enjoy.  The abuse in my marriage forced me to leave some years later. By this time I had been selling my work and teaching a group of locals.  So when I left I was free to establish a studio for the first time in a new home I bought. I began to teach more seriously but now I had to earn a living, Many art prizes and good sales in my art as well as working as a personal assistant to a psychologist I managed to keep the bills paid until settlement was reached.  At the same time, I began to write my first full-length novel, After the Dark Comes the Light.’

Some four years later after my beautiful daughter had gone onto uni and was settled, I left on an art crawl of the world by myself.  My intent was to learn as much as I could about all sorts of different art, artists’ processes, exhibitions, printing, production and circulation and so much more it took me to so many amazing places and I met some of the best, the world had to offer, like spending the afternoon in Robert Bateman’s studio having afternoon tea with him and Birgit, what a privilege for a little Aussie from the Mallee. As I travelled alone across Canada and the USA in my old 1972 Ford Ecnovan which I called, ‘The Radison’ I began to relax and absorb the extraordinary landscape around me. I would love to have spent time painting but I had to be careful being a lone woman travelling sometimes, in a dangerous country, not to mention the enormous cities. The bottom line was I learnt so much about international art and about myself and the goodness of others. Bob Bateman advised me to simply absorb the land, the animals, and the people, and when I would need to paint what I had experienced it would be in my psyche to draw on and he was so right.  

Journey