#027 Uvas

Artist: Madelaine Snook

Watercolour - 32 x 40cm 

Location: Sydney

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Born in 1995 in Gosford, NSW and educated as a Linguist at the Universities of Sydney and Cambridge (UK), Madeleine Snook has worked as a Live Art Model across various art schools and groups on the Central Coast, Sydney, and internationally, and is soon to enlist in the Royal Australian Navy as a Comms Operator. Her first leap into art came as a new year’s resolution for the year 2020: to do one painting or drawing a day for 365 days. Without skipping a single day, Madeleine packed up her watercolours and pens and even drew on the in-seat paper trash bag of the plane that carried her to her new job teaching English at a school in South Korea that February. However, what started out as a skill-building challenge quickly evolved into art therapy as the year took a sharp downward turn with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and Madeleine finding herself trapped in a foreign country with nefarious employers. These employers of the Hagwon, or “cram school”, Madeleine was contracted to work at for a year, put herself and all the other foreign teachers there into debt-bondage, a tactic used by abusers in modern slavery, and thwarted her attempts to seek legal advice.

Throughout the year, Madeleine continued her artworks, pouring every troubled emotion onto the canvas until her escape the following March, using the artworks to cover up the blood-stained walls of her on-site bedroom. After this traumatic and hellish experience, with 365 pieces of the nightmarish art produced from this, Madeleine desired to heal and re-write her experience teaching English abroad and practicing art as a happy one, with new watercolour works to reflect this. Madeleine did just that with an 8-month contract teaching English at I.E.S Miguel de Cervantes High School in Seville, Spain three years later in 2023. The experience was the opposite to South Korea in every way- relaxed, sunny, and warm, both climactically and emotionally. Reflective of this are the copious uses of warm colours (particularly yellow), depictions of the abundant fresh fruit and vegetables from the local grocers, and the beautiful architecture of the charming streets and buildings of Seville in the 63 watercolours produced there in her studio. With her February 2025 exhibition ‘Sweet Dreams, Sevilla’, Madeleine wanted to present the flip-side of her relatively very mild close-encounter with modern slavery: not the darkness put onto paper during it, but the joy, healing, and optimism of the life she found afterwards. She has had no formal artistic training but has taught herself with the advice of watercolour artist and grandfather Peter Skinner.