When Kerry Armstrong was told she had a brain tumour, something strange happened. Alongside the fear came a kind of clarity. The only thing scarier than dying, she realised, was reaching the end without ever having answered her creative calling. So while she was still unwell, she walked away from a successful corporate career and started painting full time.
Kerry's a self taught abstract expressionist and the founder of Studio Gallery Group, with galleries across Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane representing around a hundred and forty artists. She lives on twenty acres in a hundred and fifty year old homestead with her husband and business partner Michael, six kids between them, and far too many horses. She's fierce, instinctive, and completely unafraid of the hard stuff.
What struck me most was how she describes the lead up to her surgery. Not as a tragedy, but as an awakening. On the morning of the operation the surgeon raised her mortality risk, and while she was being prepped she sat trying to write Michael five letters on the back of their honeymoon photos, just to say everything she needed to say. She only managed two. Out of that rawness came her most vulnerable work, and her belief that this is the only place real creativity comes from.
If there's one thread through Kerry's whole life, it's instinct. She and Michael were about to sign an enormous Sydney lease they'd planned for years, and one morning she woke up feeling sick about it and called it off. Weeks later, Covid hit. Her gut had saved them. She also told a story about sitting on a collection of brilliant paintings for three months because she was worried about the petrol money to drive them to a gallery. When she finally went, she got in on the spot. Her advice now is simple. Don't sweat the small things.
We also talked about something I do for clients all the time, buying art for a home. For years it was painfully hard, appointments and galleries open two hours a week. Kerry built Studio Gallery partly to fix that, so you can browse and filter by size and price, and so the many wonderful artists with no walls to hang on finally have somewhere. Her philosophy is lovely. Art doesn't have to be expensive, but it does have to be personal. Buy one piece you love, then build slowly. Treat it as a journey, not a wall to fill.
There's so much more in the full episode, how she renovated her heritage home with the systems first and the television hidden, why she runs the whole thing on trust with Michael, and what's next now she's dreaming of simply being an artist again.
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Show notes and links
Conversations Under Construction is the podcast from By R.A., where we talk to the designers, makers and renovators shaping how we live. Subscribe to follow along
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