Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2021 - Student interview - 08. Nicholas O'Brien

NICHOLAS O'BRIEN: Hi, my name is Nicholas O'Brien. I studied Visual Arts at St. Augustine's College in Brookvale. My body of work is about the resilience and strength of all Australians when faced with the natural disasters that hit us each year.

My artwork was inspired by the bushfires and floods of 2020, which inspired me to display the resilience of the people affected by that. I chose this topic because I knew various family and friends who were affected by the bushfires and also by the floods. And after hearing their stories, I wanted to be able to portray that in my body of work.

At the start of the year, I decided that I wanted to do drawing and for the first couple of months of the year, I gradually developed the idea. I changed around from droughts to fires, and then decided to do a combination of bushfires and floods. The drawing process, it changed around a bit. I had to restart at some points and reshoot photos but I'm happy with how it turned out.

So as you can see in the artwork, the portrait of the woman, that's actually of my art teacher. Her home was flooded during the floods that followed the bushfire. So when she told us about that in class, I wanted to be able to portray the frustration and sadness of losing valuable items, as you can see with her holding photo albums and photo frames to show the sentimental value of certain objects she chose to save.

The portrait of the man is of my father. He's not a firefighter, he's a real estate agent. But at the start of the year, everyone had to get up and try and clean the dead leaves out of their gutters and help defend against the bushfires, so I wanted to portray that.

Also, my drawings are a double portrait using graphite. So using the graphite, I first had to kind of lay down the basic tones and values and shapes within the artwork. And then I went through and added detail using a range from 2H up to 8B graphite pencils, and also using eraser to get rid of some of the dark parts and incorporate highlights within the body of work.

So the main artists that I looked at when creating my body of work was a South African artist, Jono Dry. He has done a lot of hyper-realistic drawings and his detail and attention to the human form and emotion inspired me during my body of work, so I wanted to replicate some of those features that I found within his artworks.

So my art teacher was pretty important during the whole process. As you can see, she's one of the two people in the body of work and also a kind of motivation and assistance kind of giving me suggestions as to where I should start next or what I should include in the body of work was definitely helpful in kind of progressing the symbolism and just the overall artwork.

Art has been a very big part of my life. I've been drawing pretty much as long as I can remember and it's opened up a lot of doorways. Getting into Art Express, that was definitely a great achievement and it's also taught some important lessons in staying motivated and putting your mind to something and just being really proud of what you can achieve.