Portraits of Life from aunt and niece Summer and Alyssia Anderson at Red Door Gallery

Alyssia Anderson (left) and her aunt Candy Summer are exhibiting their work at Red Door Gallery throughout November. Photo / Paul Brooks

This month's exhibition at Red Door Gallery in Putiki is the work of aunt and niece Candy Summer and Alyssia Anderson.

Titled Portraits of Life, it is the work of two very different artists, using a common theme – faces.

Alyssia has chosen to work with oil paint on canvas and her portraits employ the use of a lot of rich colour.

"I used to do it at high school, but I've not done any art, really, in a long time. I've just got back into it. I use oils because you can rework it: they take a while to dry so you can come back to it and change it. I like the feel of the paint … it's a bit more forgiving."

The two works chosen for the photograph are like before and after aspects of the same person. In the first there are clouds of colour enveloping the top of a dark-skinned woman's head.

Alyssia likens it to a storm of confusion or some debilitating emotion. The second work shows the face above the "clouds", having "weathered the storm". Now the viewer can see the woman wears a white "turban", contrasting with the while background by clever use of blue.

The 18-year gap between her teenage paintings and taking it up again as an adult doesn't seem to have depleted her talent at all and she certainly appears to have been able to jump straight back into her art.

"It feels really good to get back into it."

Alyssia's subjects are imaginary but none the less real for that. She will have about 15 or 16 paintings on display in the exhibition.

Candy Summer works in watercolours, again following the portrait theme. One is of an old, bearded man in a green cloth cap and a red and white checked shirt, turning his head a little to the left to look directly at the viewer.

"It's the kind of guy you'd meet at the pub," she says.

She sees him perhaps as a musician, or a worker of some kind, perhaps a truck driver. Whoever he is, he has character.

The other is of a woman, head covered in a yellow fabric, hands held out in front of her, palms upward in a posture of prayer.

"In this one I was looking at going in another direction, and focusing on what prayer means … and I wanted to see how yellows would play out."

Candy says she's just drawn and doodled and dabbled all her life. "And then I got very sick, and I thought, if I'm going to die, what do I want to be doing?

"I want to paint. I want to take this seriously and really start teaching myself."

Using YouTube as a tutor, because she was unable to get out, Candy got back into painting last year.

"I realised that, for free, I had access to masters all over the world."

Candy says she was able to chat with artists and all gave freely of their time and teaching.

The Portraits of Life exhibition takes up two rooms of Red Door Gallery until the end of November.