Inside the Colourful World of Painter Liam Seear-Budd

“Might look happy, but it has an essence of sadness underneath it.”

Loose at the start

Liam Seear-Budd is an artist based in Melbourne, originally from New Zealand, and he works as a screen printer. His work is bright and colourful, and these days it’s airbrush-based. “I want a wall to pop out at you,” he told me. “I want to bring colour into the world.”

When we visited, he was working on the first layer of a painting, and he wasn’t being precious about it. “I can be pretty loose with it on this first layer,” he said, “because it gets all tidied up once you add the black and the white at the end.”

The moment he gets it right

That looseness is there for a reason. He likes his paintings to have “this defined moment where I actually get it right.” Everything before it can be fixed. “I’d be loose at the start,” he said, “and then there’s a point where if I fail this one point,” and the rest of that sentence can’t be printed here.

The paint itself doesn’t worry him. “It’s always paint,” he said. “You can always paint over it, you know?”

“My main thing is time.”

“I end up freaking out if I spend so much time on something and then I don’t like it or I’ve stuffed it up.”

Next to KAWS

Time is the thing he’s short of, even when the work is going well. His most recent show was a group show in Hamburg, and it came out of nowhere. “They reached out to me, which is always weird,” he said. “I don’t know how these opportunities come to me sometimes.”

“It was one of those situations where I had to go. There was no way of not going.” When he got there, they had hung him next to KAWS. “It was like KAWS, Andy Warhol, big dogs all in the line,” he said. “It didn’t make any sense to me at all, but pretty cool.”

Ready to quit

So does he do this full time? “No. I wish,” he said. “There’s been periods, but pretty hard.”

He came back from that trip ready to quit his job, move into a cheap house and go all in. That wore off pretty quickly after the holiday. “You realise money’s got to come in,” he said.

He has since had work in a Sonic the Hedgehog 35th anniversary show in the US, and he’s still going to a day job. “It’s still weird to have these opportunities,” he said, “but be stuck in the same kind of situation I’ve been in for 10 years.” On Instagram, he told me, “I probably look like a full-time artist.”

What changed is how much that bothers him. “If I work four days and I can paint two days, that’s fine,” he said. Letting go of the idea, he said, has “made everything feel a bit easier.”

Seven years old

I asked him about the cartoons. From about four until seven, he said, it was Saturday mornings. “Rocket Power. It was all of them.”

“It keeps me in that seven-year-old world,” he said. “And it’s more than nostalgia.” His mum passed away when he was seven. “So clearly I’ve got a switch there,” he said.

“I’m trying to hold on to that period of time.”

He wants people to feel that in the paintings: the happiness of nostalgia, and the deeper feeling he’s pushing out underneath. Some of them, he thinks, may already know it. “Potentially they have a similar situation to me,” he said, “where they’re trying to grasp onto their childhood.”

The whole thing

I asked whether reflection was a big part of his process. “It’s pretty much the whole thing,” he said. It always starts with a memory or a feeling he’s had. Flowers that were on the table when he was brought home from the hospital. Photographs of his family. Poems from his mum.

He goes deep into all of it, “trying to create more meaning, I guess, to myself behind it.” And the finished painting isn’t really what it’s for.

“It’s more of the process of doing it. It’s more of the therapy for me.”

Hold on to it

I asked him what nobody told him about being an artist. “You’re going to be in it for a while,” he said, “so have some patience.”

And he has one more thing to add. “Ambition’s that sweet juice that slowly kind of deteriorates over time,” he said. “So hold on to that ambition.”

There’s more from our conversation in the full interview. See more of Liam’s work at liamseearbudd.com and on Instagram at @liamseearbudd.