Her Album

When Astrid was four, she squeezed Bougainville flowers to try to get colour for her drawings. To her delight and everyone else’s gain, she has never grown out of the urge to incorporate her environment into the vivid, bold and dramatic art works for which she is so well known.

The environment is very much a part of Astrid’s life, for she’s experienced a variety of landscapes and cultures since she was born in Thailand to a Norwegian father and a Thai-English mother. She arrived in Australia under its canopy of bright blue skies and cracked earth, when she was ten. Her accent is a strange mixture of all those, plus a chunk of Australian thrown in for good measure.

She has been exhibiting since the sixties, shortly after graduation from the RMIT in Melbourne Victoria. Her works are now held in private homes, corporations, and art galleries from Perth to Perth to Hong Kong, gleaned from a show or two a year from Spain to Kalgoorlie. But Astrid, for the most part, a single mother with two children to feed, admits that her success wasn’t easy. Her first stumbling block was her mother deciding that since Astrid was “bad at everything” at school, the only way out was to become a typist secretary.

She was dragged to many interviews and every time she saw the monstrous thing called a typewriter she would recoil in horror! “I would sit in front of the thing and my palms would go sweaty” she recalls.”All I wanted to do was to paint creatively but instead spent them erasing my many mistakes painting Tippex”. Of-course they did not have spell check or grammar check in those days!

Then one day when she was at her wits end, she took a Melbourne tram to the RMIT College and begged for a place in the prestigious art dept. She was told to go away as she did not have a portfolio of work.

“My parents used to throw all my paintings away as we moved so often” she told me. So she used her secretarial money to buy new art materials and prepared 3 works which she took down to the College. She was again told to “go away and come back when you are 16”.

Continuing with her typist job, she was standing in the post-office when someone tapped her on the shoulder and said “Would you like me to wrap you in mink and cover you with diamonds?” She turned around thinking he was talking to someone else but realized he was John Calvert – the magician and entrepreneur of the late 50s.

After extracting her address from her John Calvert visited her parents that night – her father was astonished that his daughter was telling him the truth when a long black limousine pulled up in front of the house. “My parents were overwhelmed with his obvious look of the high-life, with a diamond ring on his finger to rival Elizabeth Taylors’, and when he offered me 15 pounds a week my father shook his hand and said “take her”!”

“Weren’t you scared?” I asked, “you could have been sold to the white slave market.” “No” astrid replied, “I was more terrified of flying in a plane. Within 6 days I was in Tasmania in his Magic Touring Show. “Because I was very young and not as womanly as the other girls, I was more nimble and so had the roles of being sawn in half, made to float in mid air, swung in a barrel and catapulted into the audience on a rotating disk. The whole experience only lasted a few months because I contracted tonsillitis and had to be sent home as they thought it was diphtheria.” 

So on her return Astrid started college, paying her way with monies earned waitressing, doing art work and modelling. Her son Julian was born. He is an excellent poet.  Mother and son have both had their creativity overlapping through poetry, woodcuts, and Astrid’s paintings used in his film making projects. Later her daughter Jasmine was born which began her career in teaching to supplement her single parents’ income.

She paints at night and on weekends, in fact any spare time she can. Her works are multi-layered and faceted. 

She has been painting and teaching for over thirty years, a long, long way from being shot out of a cannon in her efforts to get into art school. But obviously she knows she has make the right choice for painting is her passion, her best friend.

“When we are young,” Astrid muses, “we try to interpret what’s around us – but as we get older we tend to go inward. Personal interpretation with our own art is introspective and reflective.”

“Art,” she concludes, “is like a friend that will never let you down. I know that when I close the studio door, I am with a friend that I can call on anytime and will always be there.” Her long lines of exhibitions are testimony to the strength of her friendship!

Excerpts from Text by SUSAN STORM – homes and living magazine 2002