Mila Andersen

“I want my work to communicate everyday life, walking the viewer through what I see day to day in Wellington, Aotearoa. Just walking around in my neighborhood, my local fish and chip shop and other iconic places like Te Papa and the waterfront. I’ve started looking at the structure of buildings and breaking them down because it's important to have different perspectives and ways of seeing things. My family has always been involved in the arts and this has encouraged me, but it's mainly my teachers who've helped me pursue Art. Having Dyslexia has been very difficult but art has given me a way to relax my mind and paint instead of feeling different like I do in other classes. My stepmom is an architect and my dad is a builder, so I've always been around planning and building sites which has influenced my work. From the age of 8, I've always liked Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gough, they both share a painting style that, looking back, I've been hugely influenced by. I enjoy textures and seeing the strokes come through in the paint. I also love their dream-like feel. I’m influenced by how Brett Armory plays with lighting and features weather in his paintings. Daniel Pitin’s take on the structure of a building and how he manipulates layers in his paintings is also really interesting to me. I looked into Zack Zdrale when adding people and movement into my work. For these paintings I mainly used acrylic paint and gesso. I paint fast and don’t mind mistakes. I like it to look a little messy and I've never been one to want my paintings to look realistic, but something that is handmade."