Dare to doubt and keep going - Frances Yeoland

Frances Yeoland is a Sydney-born, New York-based creative director and artist who has spent fifteen years working across branding, campaigns and design systems, while building a parallel practice as an abstract painter and poet.~

She talks with Radim about growing up between Australia's Western outlook and its geographic place in Asia, discovering gallery spaces as a teenage sanctuary, and the long process of letting her commercial and artistic selves finally meet instead of staying separate. 

The conversation moves through her process, poetry as the seed of every painting, colour pulled from photos of everyday urban scenes, and the discipline of resisting the impulse to "fix" a stray brushstroke. They also wander into living eulogies, the value of sitting in ambiguity rather than being pigeonholed, and why doubt doesn't have to disappear for the work to be good.

TAKEAWAYS

• Frances trained in graphic design in Sydney without knowing it existed as a career, discovering it was a way to combine language and visual delivery
• Art galleries became a teenage sanctuary for her as a queer woman navigating a conservative upbringing, offering stories and ways of living she couldn't find elsewhere
• She spent years keeping her commercial design work and personal art practice deliberately separate, before realising the two feed and sharpen each other
• Her paintings begin as poetry — she writes fragments of language first, then builds visual rhythm and colour that mirror the feeling of the words
• Colour choices come partly from a "colour stories" photo album on her phone, pulled from urban scenes and everyday compositions she notices while out in the world
• She resists retouching or correcting mistakes in her physical work, treating an errant brushstroke as proof of the handmade rather than a flaw to erase
• Showing her art publicly for the first time, in a solo show curated by Sydney Fishman, felt deeply vulnerable but gave others permission to be vulnerable too
• She'd rather sit in ambiguity than explain herself into a single job title, believing people are too often afraid of mystery
• Doubt, for her, never fully goes away — she's made peace with it being part of the process rather than a signal to stop
• She and Radim riff on the idea of "living eulogies" — describing people by their values and qualities while they're still here to hear it

Daring Forever. Podcast with Radim Malinic

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