I go around with my eyes wide open and have been like that since I was a child. I get inspiration everywhere I go because I am always looking.

With a background in art and photography, these are, and always have been, my main attraction. Art is the fundamental discipline that challenges the creative mind to excel all the time. Art makes us vulnerable in ways few other disciplines do because an artist is never happy or secure about his or her concluded work: we do not have the luxury of a finite solution. Art is everywhere — in people, situations, buildings, nature and of course, in color. I think these images represent my styles and who I am really succinctly – from Banksy to Caravaggio.

I love a painterly technique as it has an organic feel. Seeing brush strokes really excites me. I love that artists use brush strokes as a means of communicating emotion. When I look at Lucien Freud’s self portraits, I love the simplicity and power of the brush-strokes on the some and the complexity of color he uses in each stroke in the others. The energy is very different in each of his painting, suggesting calm in the early work versus confusion in the latter work – I use these sorts of influences in my makeup.
The energy of the stroke, the understanding of chiaroscuro, is vital for character work. John Everett Millais work can be directly seen as >> Pick up the FALL 2015 issue to read and see more of Sian Richards’s artistic inspiration.