Portrait Artist, How My Career Got Started.

Portrait Artist, How My Career Got Started. 02/24/2010

Wedding Day, portrait in oil pastels by Kathy Shell

I am often, asked, to tell people when I first became a portrait artist.

I had been studying life drawing and figurative clay sculpture at Swinburne Technical College in the evenings and I was working as a housekeeper and carer for three young children during the day to earn my night school tuition and wagging secondary school so I could do what I wanted to do. I was twelve and very determined that I was going to be a professional artist and I was not going to waste my days learning algebra, geometry and French, which I never intended to use

I had chosen to do an Intermediate Certificate and a Commercial Art Certificate through, International Correspondence School and had been able to select my own subjects, something I could not do back then in the traditional day school system. On what was my last ride home from secondary school on my bicycle, I was wild with excitement, singing, ‘no more schooling, no more books no more teachers, dirty looks’ as I approached the crest of the hill for the final downhill stretch to the turn off to my home.

I was in a state of euphoria, that I had cheated the truant officer, of the joy of hauling me back, to a bricks and mortar school, where art, was suppressed. I wondered what it would be like to sail down that hill without doing what I had always been instructed to do, ‘apply the brakes’. I decided to find out.

I reached our street corner, swung into it at full speed, streaked across the road, hit the curb, somersaulted off my bike through the air, flew over the nature strip and footpath, over the fence and landed plonk in the middle of someone’s recently softly turned cushioned earth.

I came out of my stunned state, with the understanding of ‘well that is what happens, when you don’t apply the brakes’.

I remember someone coming to my aid. With pride always having been my greatest sin, I brushed their concern away by holding back my tears, brushing myself off and collecting my bike, saying something stupid like, ‘ Ha- ha, I meant to do that’, and getting my wounded self and bike, home without letting on to anyone the pain I was in.

I have no idea how I walked home, because after that I could not walk for months. My housekeeping job was gone, all I could do was watch over my three child charges in my child minding job. I also needed to keep the three children I cared for, near me, so I could watch over them, so I spent all day, every day, for weeks, drawing these three children playing near me or sketching solo portraits of their faces, which they loved and sat posing for time and again. I had adults dropping in to see my work and buying it from me. Hooray! No more housekeeping jobs.

The children were disappointed when their full time sketch artist recovered enough to improvise for myself a pair of crutches from old sporting equipment found in a shed and I could begin to get around again and back to my usual routine. That is my usual routine that no longer involved dodging truant officers thanks to my portrait art income now being able to pay for my correspondence schooling lessons and a routine that now did not include testing out what would happen if I did not apply the brakes when advised to. J Now I think of it, I still flaunt that rule slightly, just not when out on the highway or when driving. J

Well that was life back in suburbia in 1958. No convenience of mobility products to help the average injured child get around, or places where you could research the best product for disability needs, such as mobility compare , back then, or if there was, it was for the rich kids.

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