Scottish Enterprise Awards 2021

19 | Scottish Enterprise Awards 2021 Gillian Park is a painter, artist, teacher, and coach to artists who want more. With a love for colour, oil paint, and pastels, her paintings are colourful, bold, and expressive. We speak to Gillian and find out more about how she turned her passion into a career. Gillian Park always wanted to be an artist when she was growing up, but the path was never straight. Now, as a professional artist living and working in Ayrshire, Gillian is enjoying the fruits of her labour. As a Glasgow School of Art graduate, Gillian enjoyed a career as an award-winning magazine designer, working with large UK wide companies including Good Housekeeping magazine and The Home Show magazine, until 2004 when she started her own packaging design business specialising in food packaging while teaching art and design at a local college. Skip ahead a few years and the need to paint became too strong to resist. So, in 2010, Gillian picked up a brush for the first time in almost 20 years and hasn’t stopped since. “I ditched the day job and became a full-time professional artist in 2016,” Gillian explains. “I now live, paint, teach, and coach from my home, which is an old farm built in 1850. Regarding her style, Gillian loves to paint large, bold, colourful landscapes in oils and pastels and opened her on-site gallery in 2018 where her work is displayed along with lots of gifts, prints, cards and a selection of work produced by local artisans. “Colour is one of the most important things for me in painting – I love colour,” Gillian elaborates. “I don’t aim to replicate what’s in front of me, but to enhance and make the subject glow with vibrant colours, bold and exciting marks and textures.” Working mainly in oils and pastels, but also enjoying mixed media and her ever-increasing collection of sketchbooks, Gillian enjoys experimenting with materials and loves a happy accident. “My aim is to uplift through colour, finding beauty in the mundane, extraordinary in the ordinary, in everyday life and things we overlook or perhaps take for granted or have forgotten. Whether it’s an old typewriter, a well-worn armchair or weeds growing wild by the roadside. I hope my paintings are not only interesting and appealing but also make the viewer consider the story behind the image and to re-see the object or scene as something worthwhile and fit for a frame.” As well as her exhibitions, Gillian also offers one- to-one and group coaching to artists who want to improve in their work and/or to make money from their art. “Whether that’s dipping their toe into exhibiting and selling, raising their profile, and selling more, branching out into product creation and teaching, or even creating a lucrative career, making money doing what they love,” she says. In fact, such is the success of her teaching courses, that Gillian was recently bestowed with the prestigious title of Art Educator of the Year 2021 in the Scottish Enterprise Awards, and her plans for the future consist of some exciting developments. “My ‘Don’t be a Starving Artist’ programme is launching in early 2022,” she enthuses. “This is a complete programme aimed at artists who want to make money from their work - the programme will cover all aspects of selling, marketing, business skills, product development and tech.” Contact: Gillian Park Company: Gillian Park Art Ltd Web Address: www.gillianpark.co.uk Oct21324 Art Educator of the Year 2021: Gillian Park