Artist Studio Visit - Angharad Neal-Williams

“When I’m drawing, I don’t really think about style. It’s just part of your personality. So I think my drawing style is just part of me.”

A constant

Angharad Neal-Williams works as an illustrator and a painter in Melbourne. When I asked where it started, she couldn’t find a beginning. “I feel like I’ve just been drawing forever,” she said. “There was no real starting point. I just love to draw. It’s always been something I’ve done my whole life. Just a constant.”

Her work looks like no one else’s, and she has a simple explanation for it. As a kid, you aren’t as influenced by other people’s styles. “You just draw what you draw,” she said. “And then I think I’ve just kept that.”

I like that idea a lot. Most of us spend years learning to draw like other people. Angharad held on to the way she drew before anyone else got in.

“You just draw what you draw. And then I think I’ve just kept that.”

Flat colour

She knows what colours she likes. Muted tones, she said, but still colourful, and a fairly limited palette.

Paint is a real cost. Some colours run to around 60 dollars, and anything like a cadmium is really expensive. She’s particular about how it behaves too. She doesn’t like mixing colours and she doesn’t like tonal variation. “I like it when it’s just flat colour,” she said, laughing. She does a couple of coats instead. Mixing, she finds “so fiddly and frustrating.”

Quirky lines

Drawing is where it starts. She always uses a black marker, and she loves line drawing. “I really like straight-on lines that are a bit quirky and not perfect,” she said. “Imperfect, but still observational.”

Her paintings on paper are just for her. They begin with things that catch her eye, which she sketches out first. “Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.” The themes that run through them are a sense of home, love and luck.

Imagined still lifes

Lately she has had a lot of time to paint, and she has been painting what she wants to see, combining things to build new worlds. Every scene is a still life, but none of them were ever set up in front of her. “They’re all imagined ones,” she said. “There’s a sense of maybe escape, or a sense of imagined surroundings.”

There is a pattern to them once you look. Each one has a flower, a picture on the wall or a window with a scene outside, and some kind of tool. “They’re symbols of home,” she said.

“I think for the drawings, the meaning is the actual process of doing them. It just helps me think.”

Put a truck in it

While we were filming, the conversation wandered to Outback Truckers, the TV show, and from there to putting a truck in the painting. “So random,” she said. She wasn’t sure it would still look like a truck by the end.

It’s a small moment, but it says a lot about how she works. Whatever she’s interested in that week can end up in the picture.

Just helps me think

Is there more to it than that? Angharad didn’t dress it up. “I just really love it,” she said. “There’s nothing really else to it.”

For the drawings, she thinks the meaning is in the process of making them. “It just helps me think.”

And what’s next? She follows what she’s interested in, so it’s hard to say. “More paintings, more murals, more drawing,” she said. “Same old, same old, really.”