Salty Soul with Heidi O’Brien
Jodie Cameron meets our spring cover artist, who paints the ocean she grew up in and the life she’s built around it…
I take the coast road on my way to interview local artist Heidi O’Brien. There’s a stretch of ocean just before Sunrise Beach where I always slow down – nothing behind it or beside it, stretching endlessly like it could carry you anywhere.
It’s Heidi’s stretch of coast too, where she’s spent a lifetime learning its rhythm off by heart. I first met Heidi earlier this year at the Noosa Festival of Surfing while moseying around the twilight mini market before the IN Noosa fashion parade. A shell lover from way back, her lifelike Cowrie Shells caught my eye.
A full circle moment as I arrive at Heidi’s home and her infectious laugh draws me in. She’s busy moving things around her home studio, stepping over bikes and other big-boy toys. I spy the bevvy of surfboards on the wall, assuming they’re her sons’, but with a cheeky laugh she declares they’re mostly all hers.
Standing in her sunlit kitchen, she has an easy going, radiant energy of someone who’s exactly where she should be in life, and it shows before she’s said a word about her art. It’s clear Heidi is a true salty soul, and the Noosa landscape suits her perfectly. Her story has a beautiful shape to it, not dissimilar to one of her beloved longboards – from Byron Bay to Paris and back to the Noosa points. Her friend Jade was working for a Parisian atelier, so, she barely needed convincing to visit.
“I went to Paris to visit a girlfriend for two weeks and ended up staying a year,” Heidi says, admitting she never picked up more than a few words of French.
It’s a story she tells lightly yet points to a woman who says ‘yes’ to first and works out the details later – a thread that runs through her whole career. Long before Paris, before the business degree she completed because it was the sensible thing to do at the time, Heidi was a Byron Bay-turned-Noosa kid learning to surf with her father from the age of eight. It’s a relationship that still shapes her work today, more than any formal training ever could – these days she paints the ocean that raised her, while raising her two boys the same way. Her boys, unsurprisingly, are already avid surfers.
“They don’t have much choice,” she laughs.
Heidi paints from a home studio that carries more of her family’s history than most might notice at first glance. Tucked among the canvases sits an old timber trolley that belonged to her grandmother. It’s a small, unassuming thing, but it holds the paint, brushes – tools for a life her grandmother never quite got to live, her dream skipping a generation.
“My grandmother wanted to be an artist,” she says, “but that wasn’t a real career path for women of her generation. It was too promiscuous apparently, so she became a medical secretary instead.”
Ask what shows up in her paintings that she never consciously chose, and she doesn’t have to think about it.
“The ocean, surfing – that pops in without trying,” Heidi says. “If I’m not in the mood to paint, the ocean is the easiest thing for me to transition into, because I have a connection to it. It’s not difficult for me to do, it just flows.”
She paints the Noosa points from memory, not photographs, working from the feeling of being out on the water rather than a fixed image of it. By contrast, she finds still life and portrait work challenging, but it’s new ground she’s only recently begun exploring and enjoys. Her breakthrough moment arrived almost by accident, as part of the Noosa Festival of Surfing. Around five years ago, she approached Tracy Naughton – a local surf photographer, artist and organiser of She to Sea Art Show and asked if she could bring some pieces to an exhibition at Halse Lodge.
“I took five paintings and no expectations,” Heidi says. “I had no labels, no pricing on anything and didn’t expect to sell anything.
“People kept asking how much for this one, and that one. I was just making it up. Putting a little sticker on each as they approached me.”
She sold every piece and walked out with nothing left to carry.
“That was such a huge boost for me,” she says.
Heidi was working almost entirely in watercolour back then; the move into oils came later, self-taught, inspired by artists she admired.
“I just wanted to move into something else, to keep learning, and keep changing,” she says.
There was no dramatic turning point, more a steady current carrying her from one medium into the next – the way a wave doesn’t announce itself so much as it arrives.
“I paint what I feel, for myself,” she says. “My creativity comes from something inside me. I’m not painting because I’m trying to predict what someone else is going to like.”
She traces that instinct back to childhood, to the freedom of drawing and painting without any thought of whether anyone would like it.
“When you’re a kid, you just draw and paint anything you want. There’s no wondering whether you can make money from it. It’s purely for fun,” she says. “If an audience connects with the work, that’s the bonus but never the point.”
Heidi’s not slowing down either. This year she’s shown work at Noosa Longboards in Noosa – a record-store-turned-gallery space above the shop that hosts art nights, film nights and exhibitions.
Her work also featured at the Melbourne Affordable Art Fair with Stevens Street Gallery and will again in Sydney later in the year. Closer to home, her pieces hang at Brisbane Gallery in Taringa, and she continues to exhibit locally through the small, community-built shows that first gave her a room to stand in.
“I feel quite comfortable sharing all of my artwork now, even if I don’t think it’s any good,” Heidi says. “I guess it’s just part of growing as a process.”
Between talks of motherhood, sips of lemongrass and ginger tea and the big hug Heidi gave me on my way out, something passed between us that didn’t need explaining. A warmth in her soul, a twinkle in her eye, and the steadiness of a woman who has built a beautifully purposeful life on her own terms.
You can find Heidi’s work, get in touch about commissions, or follow her salty adventures Heidi O’Brien
WIN!
Heidi is offering an A3 print of Seashell valued at $120 to one lucky reader! Visit our WIN page to enter.
