Sarah Smith
Sarah Smith is an Artist. She is also a Pharmacist. With a deeply considered and analytic approach to everything she does, Sarah is redefining what it means to build a life for yourself as a kid from the country.
When Sarah Smith painted a series of intricate watercolours for her sister’s wedding present in 2020, she had no idea she’d set in motion a series of events that would change the course of her work and her life. After those initial pieces were shared with the world and a desire for her hand painted watercolours grew, Sarah slowly peeled away from her career as a Pharmacist and stepped into life as a full-time artist and small business owner.
Sarah, do you think you could take me back to the beginning, where did you grow up?
I grew up near Nevertire in New South Wales on a farm with Mum, Dad and my four siblings. I have three sisters and a baby brother. He’s the littlest, and has the biggest heart.
Did you have a pretty traditional country childhood? Farmer’s daughter that was sent away to school?
Yep, definitely. We all got shipped off in year seven. I was incredibly homesick, of all the girls in my year I think I was probably the most homesick and continued to be all the way through to year twelve. I just loved being home so much, so it was hard. I’m increibly grateful for the fantastic education I was lucky enough to recieve and all the experiences that came with it, but it definitely wasn’t a walk in the park for me.
So what did you do once you finished school?
I had a bit of a mixed gap year, I did travel for three months. So before I went away I worked three jobs around Warren and Nevertire. At the bottle shop, the golf club, the Nev pub and I did a bit of nannying and what not. I saved up my money and went on a trip with three of my best girlfriends. Just your classic UK Europe for a couple of months which was so fun. Then when I got home I ended up working on a farm in Trangie for two months to save up some more money before I went away to Uni. I went to Sydney Uni and studied a Bachelor of Pharmacy.
Pharmacy seems quite a long way from what you’re doing now. Are you still working as a pharmacist as well as working on your art?
I’m a full-time artist now. I slowly peeled away from pharmacy and I’ve been painting full-time now for two years which is insane. When I look back at some of those original pieces from 2020, I’m amazed at how much has changed but also how much my style has really remained unaltered.
It seems like there is an immense amount of technical skill necessary to create one of your pieces, because it is such fine and intricate watercolour work that you do. I’m sure you didn’t just decide one day to do these really fine pieces of art. There has obviously been a lot of development of your craft, you must have been doing this for a while?
I’ve been fostering these skills since I was little really. We were so lucky, we used to do art lessons with this incredibly talented woman in Warren, Jude Fleming. We’d go around after school and do art lessons and play around with every artistic medium you can think of. Charcoal, ink, acrylics, oil paints, watercolours, even pottery, Jude just had it all for us to experiment with. I kept it up throughout high school, for my HSC I did watercolour artworks and also graphite, really fine detailed graphite illustrations. That’s where I honed in on all of the fine brush skills. Then I just kept it up as a hobby after leaving school.
When was the moment you thought that you might just be able to make a living out of your art?
It all kicked off when I painted something for my sister and brother-in-law as a wedding present. It was something I could do for my big sister that felt really special to me. I popped it on my instagram and slowly had requests trickle in. At first I thought it was really random, but I decided to give it a try! Originally I didn’t even charge, somehow it’s turned into what it is today from that.
You must have always had this love for art, but you chose to become a pharmacist. Do you feel like there was this underlying notion of needing to get a good stable job?
Absolutely. At school I was good at chemistry, science and maths and at the time you feel pressured to do something with the marks you get. To go on and get yourself a degree, to get that hard piece of paper. Pharmacy also felt like a stable job for a rural woman, there’s a pharmacy in every small town. If you want to have kids you can drop off for a little while and come back to it, it’s always going to be there. I think that was definitely riding on my conscience when I made the decision. It seemed like the responsible thing to do.
How have you gone with the business aspect of it all? I don’t want to say that you’ve kind of fallen into the business because you’ve obviously worked so hard and it’s the combination of a lifetime of you developing your skills and your craft, but it seems like you’ve kind of all of a sudden had to figure out how to run a business?
I often think my naivety has been a bit of a blessing. Obviously with a background in health I had no idea about so many aspects of running a business. It’s honestly been so challenging to try and learn these things, but you pick things up quickly and I’m surrounded by people who I’m able to learn from. It’s been challenging but equally rewarding when things go right. I mean how lucky am I, I can support myself with my art. I must be doing something right.
You’ve just had an incredibly successful solo exhibition at the Uralla Gallery, it’s such a remarkable thing to see the value of your work grow so quickly. It’s also a testament to you for learning how to price your work, so many creatives really struggle with that. How on earth have you navigated it so seamlessly?
It’s so nice for you to say but we all do have moments of self doubt and moments stuck comparing ourselves to others. But one thing I keep trying to come back to is that I have to back myself. If I don’t, who else will?
You’ve really came onto the scene with a bang, building an almost cult-like following of your work early on. How have you managed to keep up with the momentum of that initial flurry? How do you ride the wave of that and how do you try to keep that initial momentum going?
That’s such a good question because lately I’ve been asking myself the same thing. Diversification is the answer I think. Now I see my work is almost divided into three separate parts. The print store, where I’m trying to keep creating new prints that people can collect. Gallery pieces, where I’m investing time into some super detailed artworks. And the third, which I never thought would happen, is collaborating with brands. It’s continually changing and I’m trying to keep adapting. It’s the hardest thing, balancing my time between it all.
Ah the balancing act, I think so many of us are all too familiar with how hard that can be! Learning to ride the waves in your small business is never easy! Sometimes you just have to ride it out but we all also need to try and put structures in place to make sure we survive the madness of it all. Any pointers on how to do that?
I’ve been through two big phases of burn out, when I’ve just pushed myself so hard. Sometimes we need to find our limits to know when we’ve gone too far. To know when it’s time to take a step back. And again any entrepreneur understands you are a perfectionist and you want everything to be exactly how you want it to be. Exactly how you envision the client wants it to be. It can be such a fine line to walk. One thing that I’ve started to religiously do is to turn my phone off at 6pm. When your business runs through instagram and you’re so accessible, people are messaging you all the time and things are popping up on your phone all the time. It is so draining, so I try to be really strict with with setting boundaries for myself like that which really helps.
Are you still doing some private commissioned work as well?
I feel like the joy in my artwork can sometimes be slightly taken away by commision pieces. I’ve learnt that the hard way. when someone will ask you to paint something and it’s something that you wouldn’t normally paint and you just don’t feel like it’s at the standard you want it to be at. For that reason I’ve slowly started to move away from commissions. But I still break my own rules sometimes and do the odd private commission if I feel like it’s the right thing for me at the time.
How are you managing the peaks and troughs of working in your own small business?
I’m trying to be incredibly organised. There are so many elements to my process and I’m learning to allow myself plenty of time to plan, paint, scan and edit everything. Especially with my prints and the stationary I’ve started doing. I start planning for Christmas in June! Christmas is such a big time for me and I know I need to be making the most of it to keep the dream alive! I’ve got a casual employee that has started helping me. Which is amazing. So I’ll have her throughout the next couple of months which will honestly be so invaluable, just in terms of time. It’s such a huge weight off my shoulders to have prints and products ready to go and to have someone with time available to physically pack orders and manage the online store. Leaving me with time to work on other projects like prints or gallery collections.
As a young woman from a farming family, you went and did the thing that you thought you had to do, Pharmacy, but you’ve also taken a chance on this thing that you love as well. I have so much respect for that and I am just so thrilled that it’s been so successful for you. What advice would you give to someone else who is trying to navigate the same things? What do you wish you’d known going in?
I get emotional thinking about it too because it is such a big thing. But first and foremost you genuinely just have to back yourself through any thought or idea that you have. Don’t be afraid to explore something that you might be interested in because you just never know what it could lead you to. All of these little aspects of my life, like art and craft and just whatever, have all contributed to where I am today and there comes a point where all those little things come together and the path forward suddenly seems so clear. Nothing is meaningless and nothing is a waste of time, even if it doesn’t quite make sense in the moment. So many people say the five years I spent becoming a Pharmacist was a waste of time but it’s not true at all. I’m so glad I did it, I’ll never regret studying a degree in a field where you can help so many people. And it taught me so much about discipline, time management, people skills, and those have all helped me so much with what I’m doing right now. Everything you do has value.
When we first talked about why you chose to do pharmacy, it was because it was always something you could go back to, it was the responsible thing to do. Even if you did make that decision somewhat subconsciously. Now that you’ve learnt more about your business and the freedom having a thriving small business can offer, do you feel differently about what is ‘responsible’?
I still grapple with that now and I’m always looking for ways to make my business as sustainable as possible throughout the different seasons of my life. I think about when I get to the point in my life where I might have children, and how I can continue to still generate my own income so that I never have to rely on someone else. It’s another challenge for me to overcome but I can certainly see how my little business could really change to suit my life into the future. It’s a really exciting thought actually. I love that image, you’ve probably seen it, where it’s like three mountains and you’re going up the first one and it’s like, “Augh I’ve made it,” and then you look up and you’re like, “Ohh there’s another one to go.” I feel like it represents my experience running a business and how the evolution is continual. With every win that you have there will be another challenge and you just have to keep pushing through, you just have to keep going to see what awaits you on the other side.
While you may not know what awaits you on the other side just yet, what do you hope you’ll find there? What do you hope will be in store for you over the next five years?
There are two things on my wish list I think. Firstly, I hope that I will own my own gallery space. I just wish I had my own creative space, where I could do whatever I wanted. It would also be incredible to be able to celebrate other emerging artists. I was so lucky to be celebrated when I first started and to be able to give that support to someone else would be a dream come true. The second would be to branch out into something a little different, interiors. I love interiors, interior design and visually aesthetic spaces. Potentially creating some wallpapers?
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