OORMILA VIJAYAKRISHNAN PRAHLAD, ARTIST

Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad, a self-representing artist, has lived in many places but, calls Kuwait her home. Currently in Sydney, this 40 year old lives with her husband and two kids, aged 12 and 9 years.

For those of you who don’t know what a ‘self-representing artist’ is – it is someone who creates and sells their own work and they do not mass produce their creations.

Oormila, who started out as a teacher, has always loved art. Even as a child, she loved colours, painting and was drawn to nature, especially trees and water. Her ability to view everything around her with rose-tinted glasses, enables her to bring out the beauty in even the most mundane and commonplace of things. She has been painting seriously for almost 20 years, professionally for about 10 and has been on the exhibition circuit in the cities she has have lived in, for about 7 years now. Oormila also volunteers as an art therapist for patients undergoing dialysis and diagnosed with advanced dementia at a home for the aged in the community she lives in.

As an artist who did not attend professional art school, Oormila says the journey has been a mixed bag. “Blood, sweat, tears, great days, bad days, and of course, very successful moments”. It took a while for her to be taken seriously by the fraternity, but with the unstinted support from her family, Oormila has now made her presence felt and is welcomed into all the exhibitions she applies to.

Not only has Oormila had to work hard at being accepted, but she has also had to tolerate being joked about, has been told that she is a sponger “who is able to be an artist only because your husband supports you”, and gracefully handled sticky situations at social gatherings when people have told her that her work sounds like “a waste of time”. But given her strong personality, she never lets these comments dent her self-esteem. In fact, Oormila is proud of having been able to “reinvent, improve, and rise up” as a better version herself after setbacks in life.

She is honest about the life of an artist and says, “some months I make a lot of money, and then I might sell nothing for a bit.” And her advice to those aspiring artists is to remember that, “it is a tough road but you must believe in yourself and keep honing your craft. It is not easy to make the time to create art when you juggle a home, kids and jobs. But you just have to stay determined. Put your work out there, use social media to promote your work and talk about what you do.” And to all of this she adds the one most important lesson she has learned along the way. An absolute must to survive in this industry and that is to “develop a thick epidermis!”