Committing to life as a professional artist in NZ is a leap of faith, but at the age of 17, Olivia Bezett of Orewa decided to leave school and give it a go. Her talent for “realistic surrealism”, flavoured with a whimsical sense of humour, has seen her artworks, created on the family’s kitchen table, sell by the hundreds. She spoke with Terry Moore about how sibling rivalry, and coloured pencils, changed her direction in life.
The day I was due to start Year 13 at Orewa College, I messaged all my friends and said I wasn’t going to do Year 13 after all. I’d made the decision the day before, and my family were so shocked – they knew how much I loved school and now I was leaving to become a full time artist.
My whole family are artists – and have been for generations. I grew up seeing mum working on watercolours and oils, and dad is an art dealer, gallery owner and framer. There isn’t a spare centimetre between each painting on the walls at home: no doubt that we are artistic! But for years I’d been determined to break that cycle and become a professional chef. I took catering and food tech at school and that furthered my interest. Everyone thought my older brother Anton would be the one to carry on the artistic ‘legacy’ and I guess because he was good, I wanted to prove I could do it too. So, although I’d always enjoyed drawing as a hobby, sibling rivalry made me take it more seriously. Then my dad bought me a set of Italian Derwent Coloured Pencils for my 17th birthday and I fell in love with them. I’m quite impatient, so waiting for paint to dry takes too long but with pencils you can build up a work from a rough outline and layer the colours. I’d found my medium. I use over 100 colours in every artwork, including a lot of colours that people don’t ordinarily see in animals. My mum and grandma always told me there are more colours there than you think you see – in nature there’s no such thing as black; it’s a mix of greens and purples and other shades. So I take that really seriously and see colours that other people don’t. I build up layers of colour in my work that you can see when you look closely, and the works appear quite different in different light.
There’s no doubt that social media has played a huge role in allowing me to be a professional artist in my teens. I still remember how excited I was when I sold my first work, when I was 16. It was a stag with vines and flowers in its antlers and the first drawing I’d done with the intention of showing it to people. My cousin bought it – she gave me $120 and I couldn’t believe she paid me so much. I started posting my art on Facebook and it quickly gained a following. It also lead to my first solo exhibition, last year, at Endemic World in Ponsonby and my second one there is next month. I sell 100-200 prints a month at Endemic World as well as originals and I’m booked up for commissions for the next two years. My work is now at more than 100 retailers in NZ and a few overseas through Endemic World. I also do markets, which are really fun – I like meeting people and because I’m working at home all week, it’s good to get out to a market at the weekend. Most of my commissions come from markets. We do the Tauranga one in one day, which means getting up at 3am, and I do the Coatesville Market and some in Auckland including a new one called the General Collective Market in Elleslie, which has NZ made, high quality work. I try to ‘live draw’ at the markets as otherwise people might think my work is imported, or not realize it’s done with coloured pencil. I’m always promoting the coloured pencil!
At the moment my work is all animals. I’ve drawn a lot of rabbits, because I’ve always loved them and although I’m allergic to everything with fur I’ve had a lot of pet rabbits. My brown mini lop eared rabbit, Cashew, is more like a small dog – she’s toilet trained and has her own Facebook page. I love anything whimsical and saw an opening to blend things together and make it more interesting – my first coloured pencil print and surreal work was a rabbit, but with butterfly wings instead of ears. I’ve continued in that way, but becoming more and more surreal, blending different animals together but so that they look normal until you look closer; kind of realistic surrealism. I always start with the eye and make that as realistic as I can and that’s my indication as to whether it will work or not. The eye is definitely the hardest thing, so if I’m happy with that the rest just flows. My grandmother, Lois Davis, did fairy paintings. She also made A1 size paintings for each of her kids – huge fantasy and imaginative settings including things that each child loved. She started one for me, but got dementia and had tunnel vision. My mum looked after her for years, but grandma couldn’t complete my painting before she died. When my mum could bear to look at it, a few years after my grandmother’s death, she finished it for me, doing all the colouring. And now mum, whose professional name is Josephine Davis, doing fairy paintings and more surreal work, which we’re all very happy about.
Mum has a studio at home, and we have a workshop for framing and restoration work, but I’m shunted out to the kitchen table to work. About a third of my day is on the computer, replying about commission work and taking orders. Mostly I work on the artworks after lunch when the light is still good. I need to invest in a good lamp so I can work later – one that doesn’t morph all the colours. Only some of the work ends up being made into prints –it depends whether I’m happy enough with it. I upload the artwork to my art page and that feedback also helps me decide whether I want to make it into a print.
My friends were surprised and thinking that full time art was a crazy thing to do. I was worried that I might lose contact with all my friends but we’ve kept in touch – they’re at Uni now and some of us are going to Thailand at the end of the year. I’m pretty set that this is what I want to do but still surprised that it’s going so well. A lot of artists start well and if you can’t keep thinking of new ideas it can die down, so I worry about that. I’m getting slightly more surreal each time so I hope it will work but who knows for sure. Whatever I do, it will be art related. My family is as surprised as I am that I’m making a living; pleasantly surprised though. They knew how hard it would be to sell enough and they gave me the best advice and put me on the right track.
