Portraits inspired by the complex identity of Frida Kahlo
Hyperdetailed portraits with bold colours fill Sierra’s Wānaka painting studio. In this Q+A, we find out who the faces on the canvases are and the influences behind this artist’s work.
“My interest with Frida began as a cultural and style icon, but her harsh honesty in sharing the female experience is what
I can’t move past.”
Hello, who are you?
Hello! I’m Sierra Roberts, a 29-year-old painter from Wānaka, New Zealand. I am best known for my hyperdetailed portraits and bold colours but I also dabble in landscapes and most recently a few native birds! I grew up in Mount Cook and Wānaka which has created a special affinity with the mountains. I spent the best part of 10 years travelling and exploring Australia, Asia, South, Central and North America with an emphasis on exploring the mountains. I spend most of my time now painting, skiing and running and don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the incredible surrounding landscape.
Your ‘Backcountry Huts’ collection is such a wonderful snippet of the Kiwi lifestyle. Can you tell us a bit about how this collection came about?
Earlier this year my friend left her job as a lawyer and started a café called ‘Scroggin’. Dedicated to mountain huts and the unique way they bring people together, adventures and the constant source of inspiration they give us.
I was asked if I’d like to hang some paintings on her walls and I thought it would only be fitting to have some of the iconic mountain huts around Wānaka to bond people and get them talking about their adventures. The images were sourced from other local adventurers and friends who allowed me to paint and bring their memories
to life.
What has your creative journey been like, when did you start painting?
I started painting late in high school. Wānaka has a month or two a year of inversion (no sun) which can get a bit depressing, so painting was an outlet for me to enjoy in the sad cloud season. I used to just copy portraits out of magazines or draw friends’ pictures. It was always just a hobby and a bit of fun. When I left high school I studied fine art in between ski seasons in both America and New Zealand and left after receiving a Diploma in Fine Art.
The more I’ve drawn and painted the more and more passionate I’ve become about it. I loved learning art history in university (and still do), but really I just wanted to paint. The university wasn’t pushing painting as a medium and I was told that “painting is a dying art”, so I left feeling very disheartened. I moved to Australia, worked, saved money and went travelling for about eight years (working when needed).
I didn’t paint at all during that time. I finally got inspired again after a year in South America. I saw so much incredible street art in Colombia and how it was helping communities, giving people joy and a purpose. I was a bit lost when I finally came back to New Zealand from this trip and I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I knew I wanted to paint again. I painted two portraits from photographs I had taken during my travels and sold them both in a local art show as well as winning the Local’s Choice award. This was so encouraging.
I left for Alaska to work for half the year, then came back to New Zealand with the sole intention to paint for the other half of the year. This really taught me how hard being a full-time artist would be and how disciplined you need to be while taking the financial strain off. After another stint in Alaska I began painting full-time and the further I get with it the more I love it!
Travel seems to have played a big part in your work?
Travelling is a fantastic tool for self development because it extricates you from the values of your own culture showing you how another society can live with entirely different values and function well. This exposure to different cultural values and metrics then force you to re-evaluate what seems so obvious in your own life and consider that perhaps it isn’t necessarily the best way to live.
All my first paintings when I came home were based off photographs of incredible people I had met through my travels. I was so in love with the whole world outside of the West. The colours, smells and smiles. Painting helped me relive it and go over what I had learned and still needed to learn. After I ran out of photos, I began merging some together on Photoshop and creating new faces and learning all about the culture I was painting. The best part of all my travels was connection and that’s what I try to bring about in my paintings.
Your portraiture is so detailed and lifelike. This skill must have taken a long time to develop?
I have been painting portraits since I was 17 and the evolution of them has been very gradual. My main technique is lots and lots of layers. The biggest turning point for my portraits was when I started painting landscapes (last year). They taught me how to really see colour instead of seeing what your brain tells you you’re seeing. Since then the layers and colours for portraits have really changed and in my opinion become a lot more luminous and real.
Tell us about your ‘Frida’ collection.
This collection really started on my last trip to Mexico in 2019. The markets in Central and South America always fascinated me and were my favourite places to spend time. The women are so fun, friendly and feisty! Despite my terrible Spanish we could always understand each other and have a laugh, but I would always wonder what their lives were really like and their families. After visiting Frida Kahlo’s house in Coyoacán and learning her story, I became obsessed with the idea of the female experience. All the portraits in this collection are made up, the idea being that all the women painted are familiar and relatable and you can come up with your own storylines for their life.
The ‘Frida’ collection is inspired by the delicate and complex identity of Frida Kahlo. Her brutally honest self portraits describe all the love, longing and horror of the female experience. Frida’s paintings share the differing ways we can defy the storylines laid out for us by culture. She explores her own struggles of finding her identity through multiple cultures and the margins she felt relegated to.
“The idea being that all the women painted are familiar and relatable.”
Working through this series, my fascination with Frida has evolved. My interest with Frida began as a cultural and style icon, but her harsh honesty in sharing the female experience is what I can’t move past. The heartache and losses of the female experience are often met with silence and braved alone. Infidelity. The excruciatingly painful loss of a child/miscarriage/stillbirth/abortion. Change of body, and beauty. Friendships, how they grow or fall away. Jealousy. Motherhood (or absence of). Family. Guilt. Sexual trauma. Watching your parents grow old and pass. Ageing and wisdoms.
These paintings are an embodiment of Frida, as we all are. The silent pain as a right of passage. It lives within our eyes and hearts. The truth bonds us, but silence separates us. Flowers have long been a celebration of fertility, fleeting beauty and a connection to the natural world. The flowers celebrate femininity in all stages, the fragility of life. The flowers worn upon our head are cause for celebration and the silent sisterhood to which we all belong.
‘I paint the flowers so they will not die’.
Wānaka, New Zealand
