Featured Artist Fiona Morgan

Artsy Shark presents Australian artist Fiona Morgan. She has begun an intriguing project which you can follow on her blog. Enjoy her portfolio!

 

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My background is medical illustration and 3D animation. Although I studied Industrial Design at university, I have no formal art training aside from some oil painting lessons when I was about eight.  I am a very entrepreneurial type of person and don’t believe that formal training is necessary to succeed.  Practice, asking questions and figuring and out where to find the answers are the keys.

 

 

My current project is the ‘Art Filled Seasonal Cookbook that happens to be Vegetarian’. A year long project of seasonal vegetarian/meatless meal recipes posted freely online 3-4 times a week. Each recipe has an original accompanying artwork that aims to capture the essence of the dish through art, usually oil on canvas, instead of photography.

 

This is nothing against the photography of food along with a recipe, it’s just there are too many examples to mention. Everyone captures the essence of a dish via photography, until now. Each art piece is a modest size of 30 x 30cm that will fit onto a wall in even the tiniest modern apartment. Each piece is stylistically different as part of a year long exploration of my creative influences. There is a style for everyone from traditional realist paintings to graphical abstractions and illustrative musings.

Why such a commercial project?  I believe in art for everyone, not just the self selected elite of ‘art collectors’.  Art should be accessible (and therefore of interest to) ordinary people.  That means too that artists need to learn how to talk about their work in a way that ordinary people can actually relate to.  People don’t generally want to buy a random piece of art.  People like having a connection to a piece, a feeling or story they can relate to.

 

 

The internet is crucial to me in this aim.  It makes it unbelievably easy to reach all those people who are interested in buying original art but aren’t likely at all to go out of their way to go to a real world art gallery.  It makes it so much more possible to find people who share similar visual tastes all over the world, not just the small number who happen to be geographically local, and art collectors.

 

 

By telling the stories behind each artwork and reaching out to thousands of people who have similar visual tastes, the internet makes it entirely possible for artists to cut out the middle man of gallery representation.