printmaking background
Cecille didn’t study art in high school or at university. In fact, she didn’t study print-making either. She stumbled across an off-cut of lino on the art room floor in her last year of high school and kept it in her paint box at home.
Years later when pregnant with her first child, she pulled it out and sketched a little scene of her living room on its surface with a pen. She found a carving tool in her mother’s house and cut out the lines, brushed over some green fabric paint she had in the cupboard and pressed down a sheet of A4 paper to reveal her little picture. Cecille didn’t realise, until she was exposed to the work of Margaret Preston, that you weren’t meant to cut out the lines but the spaces(!)
When her son was 10 months old she went to live in Philadelphia. Distanced from her family and her career, Cecille found herself searching for something to fill the empty spaces in her day. In a back street in West Philly she found an art supply shop and purchased a set of ‘proper’ lino tools and a few sheets of lino. That night on her kitchen table, while her baby slept, she began to transfer the sketches from her journal across to this new medium.
Motherhood seemed to create the perfect environment for her to record her more personal creative side. It gave her the philosophical distance, emotional closeness and physical tiredness(!) to look at life from a different perspective.
I had plenty of time during the winter months in Philadelphia to think of Australia, and plenty of mixed emotions about motherhood and womanhood. As I recorded these moments I came to realise that perhaps other people shared these feelings too. As my observations became keener, a wry sense of humour seemed to rise from the silence carrying me from one lino to the next. The carpet was littered with lino cuttings and the sink was filled with ink and there was always a great sense of resolution when the first print was gently peeled off.
Ever since then she has been chipping her way through the large and small events in her life, recording her thoughts, feelings and observations. The kitchen table is still the centre of her creative space.
I love to create with a sense of my everyday world around me. My printing process is intentionally very low-tech and takes place in my kitchen. It’s such a wonderful contrast to my commercial career which uses well-refined, technology-focussed forms of creativity.
Her impressionistic style is now enjoyed by a passionate clientele who connect with the quirky sense of humour which is a feature of many of her images.
Cecille is director of the Banyan Tree Creative Services Pty Ltd and lives on Sydney’s northern beaches.