"Art has always been a real solace" (Frances Yeoland bonus episode)
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Why does Frances Yeoland describe art as a lifelong solace and home?
Hey, welcome to this bonus episode of the Daring Forever podcast. This is my chance to zoom in on a few standout moments from this week's interview, finding the ones that deserve a second look and dig deeper into what makes them special. This week I spoke with Frances Yoland, who is a Sydney-born and New York-based creative director and artist whose abstract paintings begin as poetry, fragments of language turn into colour and rhythm of the page. In our conversation, we talked about art galleries as a place of home, living eulogies, sitting comfortably with ambiguity and why doubt never really has to leave the room. The episode published a few days ago was titled Dare to Doubt and Keep Going, and it's about the tension between making a living and making art.
If you haven't checked out a full episode, let me share with you these four standout moments.
I think for me art has always been a real solace. It's always been a place to go for me to be able to survive different things, survive understanding myself. And no matter where you are in the world, you can go to a museum or a gallery and you can find a kind of home there and connect with other people through art. It's always been that place for me. And my parents were not particularly interested in visual art. But I think being in Sydney, I had access to different museums that I would go to as a teenager. And that has been something that I've continued to do throughout my life in a pretty voracious way, I would say.
So Frances mentioned this almost in passing when she was tracing her story back to being a teenager in Sydney, a queer woman navigating a pretty conservative upbringing and finding the gallery spaces a place where different ways of living were allowed to exist. It was the moment when I realised that she's been a lifelong artist before even her telling me that she's an artist.
How does Frances resist retouching her work to honor the handmade process?
And I saw this as a fantastic sort of revelation about how a person lives and breathes what they believe in. Because you don't have to tell someone in many different ways who you are and what you do. But if you tell them what you believe in, I think we get to really understand who they are and what they stand for. And in some way, it was a beautiful, lovely human way into our conversation that could have easily stayed on the surface of the job titles and the client work. We very much talk about who Frances is and what's in her world.
It's such a good question. And I feel like a lot of designers and creatives are listening to this. It's like you see a mistake and you're like, oh, I just want to fix it. But that's the impulse that I'm fighting in that moment, I think. I just posted a photo on my Instagram and there was like a bit of the paint went over the line on the edge. And I was like... I could retouch it, but I really asked myself not to. I was like, this is what it means to be handmade. And obviously I wish that I had done it neater or inside the lines or whatever, but I think you have to, it's a process of acceptance and being like, okay, that's what it means to make something. And
here it is.
What role does poetry and language play in the creation of her abstract paintings?
was an interesting second part of our conversation where we talked about the powers of being a digital artist or digital designers with digital tools they can fix any mistakes or anything that goes over the line and I love when Frances said that she caught herself wanting to fix something in post and stopped herself and I think when she said this is what it means to be handmade and She really talks about that small specific detail, which is about more about a discipline of letting things be imperfect on purpose, especially for someone whose day job is polished branding work. It was a great contrast, retouching everything at work, retouching nothing in a studio. Kind of felt genuinely incredible to know that this is her principles and that's what she listens to from the signals from within.
It's like, where does anyone's art come from? But for me, as I said, it comes from an emotional place and it's usually with language. So I also write poetry and those sort of fragments of language become the basis for the piece.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Why does Frances Yeoland describe art as a lifelong solace and home?
0:00–1:49
2
How does Frances resist retouching her work to honor the handmade process?
1:49–2:56
3
What role does poetry and language play in the creation of her abstract paintings?
2:56–4:47
4
How does she translate emotional language into visual rhythm and colour?
4:47–6:15
5
Why does Frances focus on the process over the final product when creating art?
6:15–7:11
6
How does she navigate doubt and the tension between commercial work and personal art?
7:11–8:33
7
What resources does the host recommend for listeners wanting to cultivate daring creativity?
8:33–9:52
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Daring Forever (Find your Extraordinary)
Dare to doubt and keep going - Frances Yeoland
"Not all ideas are good" (James Martin bonus episode)
Dare to slow down and think deeper - James Martin (MBJ)
"I don't think opportunity is found. it's built" (Marissa Garcia bonus episode)
Dare to make it on brand - Marissa Garcia
"Self-doubt is the blade in my pencil sharpener" (Benji Wiedemann bonus episode)