The Voice Behind the Art

My voice lives within my art

For much of my life, I struggled to believe that my voice mattered.

I often felt misunderstood for the way I thought, the way I saw the world and the intensity with which I felt things. I was told I was too opinionated, too dramatic, too much. I watched people dismiss my thoughts before they had truly heard them, and somewhere along the way I began to believe that perhaps my voice was not one people wanted to listen to.

So I found another way to speak.

I paint.

Art became the language I could use when words felt too fragile, too exposed or too easily misunderstood.

On a canvas, nobody could interrupt me.

Nobody could tell me I was thinking too deeply, feeling too much or asking a question I shouldn't ask.

I could simply put it there.

My voice became the movement of my hand, the mark of the brush and the colours emerging onto the canvas. It lived in the symbols I chose, the details I buried and the stories I constructed around them.

Art became my shield.

Not a shield built to hide from the world, but one that allowed me to stand within it.

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The places the stories come from

I don't always understand where the worlds I create come from.

Sometimes I think my imagination is connected to the most damaged parts of my soul — places shaped by sadness, struggle, anger, observation and experiences that have left their mark.

Perhaps that is where some of the stories begin.

But there is curiosity there too.

Humour.

Defiance.

An inability to accept something simply because that is the way I have been told it is.

I question things.

And when a question gets inside my head, it tends to stay there until I have done something with it.

Sometimes that becomes a painting.

Sometimes a sculpture.

Sometimes an entire collection.

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From a whisper to a roar

For more than thirty years, I have released pieces of myself through my work.

At first, quietly and cautiously.

Small fragments of emotion found their way onto the canvas while I remained safely behind it.

Over time, that changed.

The whisper became a conversation.

And eventually, the conversation became a roar.

The strange thing is that while my artwork became increasingly outspoken, I still didn't always explain where it came from.

I could spend hundreds of hours creating an intensely personal painting, fill it with symbols, anger, humour, memories and questions — and then stand beside it and explain the technique.

That was safer.

The artwork could expose itself while I remained hidden.

I no longer think that is enough.

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Stepping out from behind the artwork

Writing the stories behind my work has made me confront something I avoided for a very long time.

I am in these artworks.

Not always literally.

Sometimes I am an observer. Sometimes I am researching experiences that are not mine and would never pretend otherwise.

But the way I interpret those stories belongs to me.

The questions I ask are mine.

The things that anger me, amuse me, frighten me or fascinate me inevitably influence what appears on the canvas.

And sometimes the work comes from somewhere much closer.

I have cried while creating pieces. I have felt enormous relief when others were finally finished, almost as though something I had been carrying had been removed from me and placed somewhere outside myself.

Those artworks contain parts of me that I struggled to say aloud.

For years I hid within their shadows.

Now I am beginning to step out from behind them.

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My heart is poetic. My delivery is brutal.

There is darkness in much of my work.

I don't apologise for that.

Pain, grief, resentment, desire, fear, weakness, absurdity and contradiction are part of being human. Pretending otherwise doesn't make them disappear.

But darkness is never the whole story.

There is humour in my work too. Beauty. Mischief. Hope. Sometimes ridiculousness.

I can make something grotesque and still find it beautiful.

I can be furious and make you laugh.

I can take something painful and turn it into something I want people to stand in front of and examine.

My heart is poetic. My delivery is brutal.

Perhaps that contradiction explains my work better than any artistic label ever could.

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The Seven Deadly Sins — and something changing

Creating the Seven Deadly Sins became a turning point for me.

I began the collection believing I was examining seven ancient ideas about human behaviour.

But somewhere during those three years, the paintings started examining me too.

They made me question my own ideas about morality, virtue, anger, patience, desire, judgement and choice.

And they made me realise how much of myself I had been placing into my work while pretending I was merely telling somebody else's story.

Perhaps that is why completing them feels different.

Something has shifted.

I am not interested in hiding quite so much anymore.

Perhaps these paintings have allowed me to put down a few things I have carried for far too long.

Perhaps they haven't.

I suppose I will discover that in whatever I create next.

And maybe, after all of this, I really will paint sunshine and lollipops.

But I wouldn't count on it.

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This is my voice

For years, I thought my art spoke for me so that I didn't have to.

Now I understand it differently.

The artwork isn't hiding my voice.

It is my voice.

Every brushstroke, strange little symbol, grotesque figure, beautiful detail, uncomfortable question and ridiculous piece of humour is part of the language I built for myself.

A language in which I don't have to ask permission to speak.

My voice was always there.

I just had to learn how to use it.

Julia O'Sullivan