ZOE YOUNG PAINTS THE SUMPTUOUS
SUBJECT Zoe Young
OCCUPATION Artist
INTERVIEWER Berry Liberman
PHOTOGRAPHER Bec Parsons
LOCATION East Coast Highlands, Australia
DATE September 2021
I’ve realised recently how damn romantic my upbringing was. My mother had a natural gift for homemaking. Everywhere the eye rested it found beauty – deeply aesthetic and lived-in beauty informed by years of her passionate immersion in art, film and music. After school, as I’d dump my schoolbag and hug the dog, Maria Callas would be playing and Mum would have put out a delicious spread of afternoon tea. Everything was a bit extra. I appreciated it then and even more so now. So, from the moment I came across Zoe Young’s exquisite paintings and the world they evoke, I felt a kinship and joy – like falling into beloved memories long forgotten.
Zoe’s work is richly layered, deeply romantic and cinematic. I came across her paintings in the depth of lockdown and was immediately transported to her world of food, paint and memories. The nostalgia for my own childhood was found in her evocation of spaces on canvas. On Instagram, her world further came alive with music and movement, and often the blurred lines between the paintings and the lived reality were surreal and inviting.
A graduate of The National Art School, Zoe has numerous accolades and exhibitions to her name, with her latest body “Still.Life” being shown in Los Angeles. She grew up with adventurous, hard-working, creative parents who populated her world with vast rural landscapes, snowy mountains and glittering inner-Sydney scenes. They lived hard and played hard, and Zoe attributes much of her aesthetic sensibility to a childhood steeped in incredible architecture (they lived in a Glenn Murcutt house), hospitality and space-making. Currently painting from her studio in the East Coast Highlands, Zoe juggles home-schooling with the needs of studio time. As she says, expressing your vision takes “years and years and years of learning how to interpret what you love about the world and how you’re going to say it.” BERRY LIBERMAN: I’m captivated by the painting behind you. It’s so beautiful. I just love your work so much.
ZOE YOUNG: Thank you. I’ve just finished this one and whilst I was painting it, I was reading a book called Dynamic Dissonance in Art and Nature. It’s a series of critiques on modernist paintings. My upcoming show in LA explores the paradox with the title “Still. Life.” The works are a study of the underlying tensions amidst the calm serenity of pandemic life as I’ve experienced it. Still life has traditionally been an accessible genre for women as we can create a language out of our domestic surroundings to explore and express the nuances and subtleties of our gaze in our time.
Often a painting literally starts because I’m like, “I love this bowl, I don’t know why, but I’m painting it today!” Objects are just a way to get into the meditation of painting.
