| I'm Shan, the soul behind The Alpine Artist. I try to offer a refreshing, unpretentious perspective on art, deeply rooted in my childhood years in the Victorian High Country. My youth was, by my own admission, a messy affair, filled with the tactile joy of digging clay from creek beds to make 'pots' and the adventurous spirit of packing sketching gear into saddlebags for days spent exploring. This upbringing forged a profound, inherent connection to the Australian scrub and its diverse inhabitants, flora and fauna – a bond that, even thirty years later, pulsates through my watercolour works and sketches.
Whilst it sounds almost romantic to be packing my art supplies into saddlebags for a perfect day riding the Great Dividing Range looking for inspiration from the back of a horse, it was in actual fact, an escape. An escape from being poor, and an escape from being disabled. I have suffered at the hands of a chronic disease for much of my life, meaning I missed out on so much as a child, and even now as an adult, I find myself saying 'I'm sorry, I can't come tonight, but please enjoy yourselves without me' more often than I get to go anywhere. Pain, and the extreme exhaustion that follows, controls my entire existence and has disadvantaged me at every turn. My only release, the only therapy that works, is to escape into a world of colour and pigment. I paint the things I want to see and the places I want to go, and the things I have seen and done on those rare 'good days', as a way to experience the vividity of life as if I was a carefree young woman without the constraints of pain and exhaustion.
My artistic philosophy is as vibrant and authentic as my brushstrokes. I embrace watercolours not just as a medium, but as a metaphor for life itself. Not just a form of therapy, watercolours to me are a constant and fluid reminder that life cannot be controlled, it is unpredictable, like the purest of pigment on wet paper. This acceptance of the unpredictable, of working with where the color flows, mirrors the loose, free-flowing life I now try to lead. My signature paint spatters aren't accidental; they are a deliberate, joyful reminder that mistakes and mess are a part of life, and a reminder to embrace imperfection and find beauty in the organic. |
