You Tell Them You're An Artist: Rocketgirl's Emotional Hit & Run

By @JustinWetch

Something was wrong and she couldn't name it. Six or seven years without painting, and the weight had crept in so gradually she didn't notice until it was crushing her. One night her partner sat her down and asked a simple question: what have you stopped doing that you used to do?

The answer was obvious once someone said it out loud. She hadn't been making art.

She picked up the brush again. And lo and behold, she says, "the depression lifted like a sunrise."

Rocketgirl grew up in rural Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Sectarian conflict on one side, rolling countryside on the other. She was a wild kid, constantly outside, but the minute it got dark she'd race back in to draw.

"Most of my earliest memories are doing anything I could to get my art into the world."

She painted stones from the garden and tried to sell them at the end of the driveway. Her customers were family members driving past. She put on weekend art exhibitions in the attic for anyone who would watch.

"My friends did puppet shows and acting. I was the one trying to be Andy Warhol in the attic."

She has severe ADHD, and art was one of the few things that could hold her attention. When she was five or six, her aunt, a landscape oil painter, let her tag along. She could barely hold the brushes. She loved it anyway.

By her teenage years she'd entered an emo phase. The only thing she made was sculptures of decayed heads. At her art college interview, they asked about the concept behind the gory work. Her answer was one word: "Pain."

The Troubles made her want out. She studied obsessively, hyper-focusing her way to the grades she needed. The University of Edinburgh accepted her, and she left Northern Ireland behind.

Her mother insisted she pursue a "normal" degree. No art school. So she did business studies, then PR, eventually earning two bachelor's degrees and two master's degrees. Her father told her the business knowledge would help if she ever became an artist. She kept that as a quiet hope.

"I always knew I wanted to be an artist. It was always the pipe dream."

But practical life intervened. She had a daughter young. She poured herself into motherhood and career. The painting happened less and less, then stopped entirely.

"I hyper-focus on things, so I thought if I get into art, I won't be able to do my job. I didn't realize it could be both."

Before the long pause, there was a wilder chapter. During a gap year she hit the hippie trail: Thailand, Malaysia, Bali. She worked in bars, went clubbing, painted murals and built sculptures at festivals across Asia.

"It was the usual stuff you do if you have a bit of freedom. It was hella fun."

She also experimented with psychedelics. Mushrooms, LSD, DMT.

"With DMT, a curtain sort of goes up and you can go behind it. You're not just seeing, you kind of feel another possibility."

She doesn't talk about it as partying. She talks about it as spiritual exploration, finding her inner self. The experiences left a mark on her art: the sense that the world isn't quite as it seems, that there's something behind the surface.

The free-flowing chaos of the rave scene fed into her work too. The feeling of being lost in sound and movement, no care in the world. She still tries to capture that abandonment in her paintings.

"It's a mixture of both in my art. The free-flowing chaos and also the deep introspection."

Ask her to describe her style and she'll pause. It took her a while to find the words.

"I would call it post-iconic figuration. Figurative abstraction with a signature of obscured eyes."

The female form rendered in chaos. Expressionist color. A Bacon-esque looseness with the figure. And always those eyes, painted over with bright flashes. People call them "splotches" or "eye flashes." They've become her signature.

Her process is a hybrid of everything. She's classically trained in oils, painting since childhood. But she'll snap a photo of a canvas mid-work and ask ChatGPT what colors she mixed for a particular gray. She has custom AI models trained on her own work. She'll generate variations, collage them in, paint over them digitally, then apply the changes back to the physical piece.

"The beauty of working digitally is if I mess up a painting, I can revert to an earlier photo. I've rescued a few pieces that way."

She never knows what medium a piece will become when she starts. Oil? Digital? Both? She decides as she goes.

"I literally love mixing and matching everything. I'll be like, 'What are we doing today? Is this one going to be an oil painting or digital?'"

When she finally started painting again, she was shaky. Finding her footing. Then a friend of her ex came over one evening. Paul Nesbit, a curator from Edinburgh who'd worked with serious artists for decades.

He saw her new work. He looked her in the eyes.

"From now on, whenever you meet anybody and they ask you what you do, you tell them you're an artist."

She was stunned. She hadn't thought of herself that way. But Paul insisted. He told her she didn't need more school, more credentials. Her work was already there.

"If somebody like that tells you something like that, you listen."

A few months later she organized her first solo exhibition. Then COVID hit. Then crypto art. By spring 2021 she was minting NFTs and never looked back.

She wants her art to ambush you.

"I want it to do a hit-and-run with your emotions. I want people to feel that they see themselves in the chaos, the fragility and the strength of the subjects I paint."

Love, loss, desire, rebirth. She composes so that color and texture and movement combine into an emotional punch. The goal is a visceral response before you even have time to think.

"I just want some sort of reaction. Maybe confused, maybe excited, maybe completely turned off by it. As long as it's something."

Mythology runs through her work. Her grandfather read her Greek classics as a child, and those glamorous legends never left. She weaves in religious imagery too, a residue of her strict Protestant upbringing. Crosses appear often. She studied theology, visited cathedrals across Europe, fell in love with the visual language of the sacred even as she questioned the faith itself.

"A lot of the time it's because it looks cool, basically. But it does add depth."

In November she finished a month-long artist residency in Bali. Ten artists living and creating together. She calls it life-changing.

"From day one, day two, it felt like we'd been university friends. It was really quite magical."

She learned something from each of them. Resilience and vision from organizer Kirill Pobodin. The photographer's eye from Maria. Childlike wonder balanced with wisdom from her roommate Los Cogomelos. Generosity with knowledge from her close friend Nuclear Samurai.

She came back with a fire in her belly.

"I feel like I'm 10 times, maybe 100 times more ambitious than I was before I left."

She's planning a solo show for next year, and a project called VEIL that will involve international travel and integrating photography into her mixed-media workflow.  She wants to elevate others, not just herself. The residency showed her what's possible when artists lift each other up.

"I live, breathe, dream, eat art. If I could eat art, I would."

Rocketgirl shouts out early collectors @norcalguy and @flyingbeagle ("I had hardly any followers, and it was a real boost to have these big names see potential"), @ClaireSilver12 for the AI art contest that gave her a confidence boost, and her biggest collectors: @rektfluf ("not a day goes by where he's not sharing the art"), Mlow ("an all-around diamond"), and @batsoupyum ("just a good egg").

Artists inspiring her lately: @adamtastic, @paranoidhill ("I adore her work and the way she conducts her business"), Nuclear Samurai ("one of the best AI artists out there"), and @aylaelmoussa ("every time I see a piece of hers I'm like, I want it").

What does she wish people understood?

"I'm both a deeply serious person and a deeply unserious person. I wish more people understood that duality."

For future Weekly Dose episodes, @rocketgirlART recommends @pobedeen, @degens, and @nuclearsamurai.