• 2 years ago
Colour in Your Life featured artist Cherie Medway appeared on Colour In Your Life Season Twenty Three (23).

Read a little bit about the artist here, and support our site by joining and watching the episode below.

Cherie Medway is a multi media artist based in Melbourne. She likes to explore a range of topics from portraits, landscapes, cityscapes and figurative works with a particular interest in fusing the female form with flowers in an abstract interpretation of our co-existence with nature.

Cherie grew up loving all things creative and art was definitely one of those things. Her mother was a traditional sign writer and artist and her father a musician. She did ballet from the age of 4 and art was her favourite subject at school.where she would hang out int he art rooms every moment she could.

Then something happened. She was marked for her final assignment and in her own eyes it didn’t seem to be a very good mark. In hindsight she has no idea what anyone else got that year but in her own mind she accepted an idea that perhaps art was not for her after all and she turned her back on it.

Other creative pursuits filled the void, working in television advertising for 10+ years, singing lessons which resulted in 15 years of performing in bands and musicals and releasing an album of 13 original songs plus a short stint in live radio. All of this while also becoming a wife and mother to two very talented children in their own right. Life was busy and she was happy.

In 2012 the family moved to Melbourne and Cherie had to leave all of her creative things behind. Within 3 years she was battling depression.

In a moment of desperation she decided to pick up the brushes again. Just for something to do. It was like coming home. The spark turned into a fire.

With no formal art training she found other artists to learn from, some in person, some online and others by purchasing their training systems. Starting with acrylics which she was already familiar with, she found artists who did work she liked and learnt their techniques soon expanding into oils and soft pastel. She discovered that when she tried to apply the techniques she was learning though they would always come out in their own way. No matter how much she tried to wrangle them into submission it didn’t matter. That was when she realised she had her own style and that she just needed to embrace it. She also felt that these paintings seemed to know what they wanted to be and her job was to get out of the way. She attributes this realisation to finding her artistic voice. It was at this point that her ladies really showed up.

Her signature style is affectionately called “Ladies in the Flowers”. What started off as a simple idea of us being one with our environment has evolved into a collection of works that embody nurturing, kindness, empowerment, peace and hopeful optimism. It is how she feels creating them. She feels the female form is representative of all of those things.

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