AU Magazine Issue 3

H
AVING ALWAYS HAD AN INTEREST and tendency to
experiment with art, Erika Marie was for a while searching for her
niche, the medium that would speak to her. Her artistic journey
really started to develop with being accepted to
Limerick School of Art and Design. There she studied fashion
design, which in turn lead to fantastic opportunities such as being
invited to Paris Fashion Week to work for a designer. While
there, she was witness to runway makeup by Val Garland, an
experience that opened her eyes to the idea of makeup being a career.
Growing up in Kilkenny, Ireland, a major inspiration to
Erika has been Alex Box. According to her, she would fall in love with
images, and those would always turn out to have been done by the same
person, Alex Box. In her final year of school, Erika began working for a
cosmetics brand which gave her the chance to learn about the medium, and
then to express herself with it, ultimately giving way to and obsession that she
realized to be her desired career path with which she could have a lot of fun.
Erika embodies a sense of spontaneity and embraces the
unknown. In her own art she trusts her impulses and instincts
rather than attempting some premeditated vision. She admits that
sometimes when starting a project she does not have an idea or even
know what direction she will go. Erika, like many other artists, has
become very familiar with and endorses the concept of “happy
accidents”. That is to say often the best creations can be credited to
unconscious happenings or even mistakes rather being the result of
intention. In describing her own “Human Portrait”, a piece inspired
partly by impressionism and partly a friend’s painting, Erika says,
“I didn’t want to overthink my placement so I did this quite quickly and just
kept applying product until I was happy with the overall look. I think this is
why I am so happy with this piece as I didn’t hold myself back and just really
had fun in the process and trusted myself to stop when it was still quite raw.”
Though Erika was not formally trained, her own process of
trial and error has bestowed on her not only considerable skill in
her medium but something that some artists never find. She has
come to posses a precious mindset in that she embraces her own
tribulations, realizing that she can learn from each piece she does.
It is also refreshing to have an artist that values herself and is
simultaneously able to express and willing to connect with
others through her art. She has made herself a success story and with an
attitude that we could all afford to share, one she concisely declares
in saying “Do what feels right and trust yourself because at the end of
the day, art is personal and it should come from the heart”. She is now
living in Edinburgh, Scotland, working in makeup artistry full time.
19