painting the town red (and blue, and yellow)
THERE’S A GAME CARLA MCRAE PLAYS WITH HER ART: HOW TO CREATE WHOLE WORLDS (AND BIG FEELINGS) IN THE SIMPLEST WAY POSSIBLE.
Tell us a little about yourself, please. I’m an artist and illustrator. I work from my studio in Melbourne, but I grew up on the Sunshine Coast. I moved in 2012, just after I finished studying graphic design at uni.
What was your relationship with art as a kid? I have really strong memories of being at school and drawing in the margins of my books, and being so excited to go home to draw things I had in my mind. I’d sit at the coffee table and draw until dinnertime, then eat and go to bed. On the weekends, I was always making little books and stories, or copying drawings from Playstation manuals. I liked to draw people a lot, which I still do, and I liked to create worlds for them – it was a way of projecting myself into a character. There’s something about the action of doing the drawing – getting into the workflow or the wormhole. As a kid, that was so rewarding. And when I draw now, it’s tapping into the same feeling: losing yourself in something manual for hours, and coming out the other end with results in front of you.
How did you get your start as a professional illustrator? I moved to Melbourne, and I had a folio that was illustration-based. I went for a couple of jobs and didn’t get them, so I started working at a burger shop, but I was freelancing as well. It wasn’t enough to get by on – just doing t-shirts for bands, random little editorial jobs. In 2013, a friend of mine started a sock company called Odd Pears, and I started working for him as the creative, designing the socks and doing social media and branding. I was doing that a few days a week, while still doing my freelance work and flipping burgers. In 2014, I applied for an internship at a gallery and didn’t think I’d get it, but I did. I decided I had just enough money coming in from Odd Pears and the internship stipend, so I quit my burger job, and I haven’t had a job in the outside world since. The longer I’ve been doing my work, the bigger the projects get and the more independent I’m able to be.
What does a day in your life look like? I wake up in the morning, make a coffee at home, do my admin, smash out some emails and work out what I’ve gotta do for the day. I’ll start the journey to my studio, and on the way there I get in the headspace for work. Then I’ll sit down and try to be as productive as possible in eight or nine hours. I go home at dinnertime, then I might do some more emails, or try to plan my next day. Because I do such varied work, one week I might have to do 20 drawings for a book, and the next I might be working on a big marathon mural that takes a week. It changes, so I’m constantly shifting my routine.
How did you get into painting walls and murals? I’d wanted to paint walls for ages, but it felt like a really intimidating thing to do. I had a friend who was managing a bar in the city, and she wanted the stairwell painted. I put my hand up and said I’d do it with a couple of friends. I used that stairwell as a chance to learn how to buff a wall back and adjust to scale, getting used to scaling up and keeping proportions right. I started dating my boyfriend David Booth (known as Ghostpatrol) that year and he gave me a couple of opportunities to paint with him on some commercial projects. In those projects, I learnt a lot about the process of painting a mural, from doing the sketch to ordering paint to which brushes you should use or how different surfaces work. Since then, we’ve collaborated sporadically, but I took that information and went my own way with it.
What’s the difference between painting murals and painting smaller
pictures? When I’m painting a wall, I’m getting enjoyment out of it while I’m doing it, then I have to walk away and it’s up to people to look after it, or destroy it, or whatever they want to do. I focus a lot on simplifying and making work that is minimal. Painting big is the best way to learn how to be simple. You have a time constraint and different materials, and you have to use your body, so you get tired. It’s so different to making little work where you get caught up in the