Jordan Rush spreads colour around the city

A young artist based in Dunsborough, Western Australia, picks her brush and starts to paint another portrait on a bright blue wall. Apart from portraits of Biggie and Tupac, she is now working on a big mural in her home city.

Jordan started drawing live at a street party. “The pressure is definitely with the number of eyes watching, but I enjoy the energy of having so many people seeing and engaging in my work,“ says the artist.

Jordan Rush is a freelance painter and specialises mostly on murals and bigger canvases. Although she has been drawing as far as she remembers, she has never attended an art school. She took art in high school, but lost her excitement for drawing due to restrictions of the curriculum. Jordan gave her hobby up and got a degree in psychology and business.

“I didn’t pick it up again until I was 24. The reason I picked it back up was that I didn’t want to get a real job and I knew I could get really good at art if I just dedicated time to practicing, etc.,” she says.

Success came quickly. Now she is known as Havoc Artworks and does commissions as well as original paintings, organises exhibitions and runs an e-shop. She had a solo exhibition two months ago. She finished the work she wanted to show at the last minute, but it was worth it. “The pieces I displayed were all put together to look as though they had been cut out of a street wall. They had high texture and one had brickwork. The general theme of the exhibition was the creativity that lives in all of us,” says Jordan.

Jordan mainly creates portraits of real people or fictional characters. “My main subject matter is people because that’s naturally where my interest lies,” she says. Her frequent themes are also Native American motifs and skylines. About getting inspiration, she says, “I don’t think there is one single factor that inspires me. There’s a combination of wanting to get better at painting, wanting to work for myself, wanting to create work that I want to see, and also wanting to become the woman that is capable of achieving all my goals.”

Her artistic style is very unique, too. She started with dotwork acrylic paintings and now she uses a combination of sprays, acrylic paint, and collage to create bold colourful pieces. She claims that she does the art she wants to see around and tries to match her vision more closely every time.

Text vznikl v rámci kurzu Angličtina pro žurnalisty pod vedením Mgr. Aleny Proškové.

Foto: Jordan Rush