Celebrating women through portraiture

CREATIVE mind Paula Maki recently unveiled her Unicorn Lane exhibit, Oh, the Women You’ll Meet, which celebrates the amazing females in her life.

As an accomplished musician, Maki took the opportunity of exhibiting to flex her visual art muscles to bring the group of women most important to her to life through paint and canvas.

“I love portraits, they are some of my favourite things to do, I think because I like capturing people’s character and how I see them,” she said.

“I decided to make them all women because when I’m not painting I play in a band and lately we’ve been talking about the way people project rivalries between female performers and bands.

“It often seems to be that women can’t really co-exist, it always has to be one person versus the other so, I wanted to paint these women who are really important and amazing in their own right.”

Working from photos of each of the women, Maki said there’s a special and unique story behind each of her portraits.

“The first one is my grandmother, my nonna, who co-raised me and is one of the strongest women I know. She came to this country when she was 21 and didn’t speak a word of the language,” she said.

“There’s also my best friend Indigo with me in one of the paintings, it’s always been her and me and I also painted her mum, she got me through high school.

“I wanted to portray a series of women in my life as I see them; poised, feminine, strong and standing in solidarity with each other.”

In addition to painting in her down-time, Maki is also a member of local band Meraki Minds and is currently studying to be an arts educator.

“Before music, painting was something I always did in school and has become a great outlet for me,” she said.

“This is something that I do just me, everything else like band stuff is kind of teamwork.

“I usually just give my paintings away and not really say much about it but when I was approached to do an exhibition, I thought that would be great to have my paintings actually on display.”

With the exhibition set to run until 21 March, Maki said she’s already received a wealth of positive feedback from her friends, family and the public.

“I had some people come and see the exhibition and message me asking for a commission which has been really cool,” she said.

“I’m painting how I see the world and trying to get as much colour and expression and stories into them as possible.

“I want to catch people’s eye, grab their attention and say look how amazing these women are.”