Into the Meditative and Vivid World of Artist Vee BKL

Vee BKL is an abstract visual artist based in Australia. After a decade long career in design, she reconnected with her artistic side and had her first group exhibition in January 2024. Her artistic process begins with inspiration drawn from natural shapes, textures, and colour combinations encountered during her walks and travels. Using liquid watercolours and pigmented inks, she builds layers of transparent and vibrant hues, creating fluid, dynamic backgrounds. The unpredictability of her materials lends an organic spontaneity to her work, while her detailed linework, executed with Posca and alcohol pens, introduces precision and balance.

Vee’s compositions are both meditative and immersive, inviting viewers to pause and uncover new perspectives within the intricate layers of color and form. Her art resonates with emotional depth, offering a sensory journey that blends natural beauty with the complexity of human experience, creating a space for personal reflection and connection.

Artist Statement

I am Vee BKL. I am fascinated by nature and the depth of our emotional world. I create abstract paintings where elaborate details mix with vibrant palettes, inviting for a pause to explore profound emotional resonance. My work explores the delicate balance between fluid movement and intricacy. Using inks, Posca, and alcohol pens, each piece invites viewers on a personal journey, offering a new emotional landscape with every glance. My art invites feelings of serenity, joy, and delight, while taping into curiosity, creating an immersive experience that draws the viewer in to explore and reflect.

• Vee BKL

Interview with Artist Vee BKL

You describe your work as inviting viewers to explore a new emotional landscape with every glance. Can you share a bit about your creative process and how you bring this vision to life on canvas?

My inspiration comes from the shapes and colours I find in nature. On my walks and travels, I often take photos of intriguing colour combinations or textures. I study the essence of natural forms, their patterns and fundamental characteristics, which I then use to create abstract representations. When beginning a painting, I choose a specific colour palette and build it up with multiple layers of ink, exploring transparency, contrast, and colour intensity, in a mix of fluid shapes. I always have a theme in mind to guide me, whether it’s a forest, flowers, or corals. From there, I develop a library of abstract elements on the canvas that embodies the theme. I love to explore various iterations of a single base element, allowing it to grow, evolve, and multiply. With so much to see and discover in each finished piece, viewers are invited to pause and dive into this world of colours and details, making space to form their own story and connect with both the art and themselves. It’s a beautiful feeling!

Your materials—inks, posca, and alcohol pens—seem to play a big role in shaping your work’s unique texture and fluidity. Can you tell us more about your choice of materials and how they allow you to explore movement and intricacy?

I use liquid watercolour and pigmented inks as the base for my backgrounds, as they allow me to play with transparency, gradients, colour vibrancy, and create fluid blends. I start with pours, sprays, dilutions, and pigment saturation, trying to guide the inks in certain directions and shapes. Ultimately though, the liquids move on their own and take their own form as they settle and dry on the canvas. It’s almost like a work of matter, sculpting with water and pigment, where the final shape remains unpredictable. Once the background is finished, I add intricate details with pens (Posca and alcohol-based), allowing for precision and intricacy, while keeping the details simple, mainly through combinations of flat colours.

With a background in fine art, as well as over 10 years of experience working in design, how has art education helped you in your artistic journey?

I’ve always been a creative — drawing, painting — so studying art felt like a natural choice, even though I didn’t yet have a clear idea for a professional direction. I began touching graphic design at 11, designing logos for my dad’s company. Back then, I didn’t have the maturity or life experience I have now, and graphic design, with its framework and structured paths for growth, became the perfect opportunity for me to develop within a career that still allowed for a certain level of creative expression. After more than 10 years bringing others’ voices and ideas to life, I realised I needed to focus on my personal creative expression and start creating purely for myself. That, to me, is the essence of being an artist. At that point, something magical happened— a visceral need to throw colour on a canvas and get in that almost meditative state I reach when I draw repetitive and intricate patterns. Once I recognised this pull and had a clear vision of the way my style needed to mature, I gained clarity about my artistic voice. Colors, patterns, and linework had always been present in all my younger art; I just needed to see the recurring pattern. That’s when I started creating art that felt authentically me.

You mention that your work invites viewers to experience a deep emotional resonance. Can you talk about the emotions you aim to evoke through your pieces, and how you go about capturing these feelings in your art?

Colors are deeply personal. They are often the first thing that captures the eye. Combinations of colours tell a story that speaks not in words but as a visual dance crafted from a palette of emotions, reaching into our personal emotional world. Colors resonate differently for each of us. Then, as you get closer, the details draw you in. That’s when the immersion begins — serenity flows in, and the viewer is transported on a wave of inner sensations. It take a moment in time to pause, to reflect, and to interpret the visual story unfolding before us. The details reveal stories within the larger piece, urging us to slow down, explore, and ask: what are we seeing? Where does it lead us?

As we focus on the experience offered to us, we connect with ourselves in beautiful ways. It may feel overwhelming at first, even chaotic, but by paying attention to the small things we find that everything has its place. Which is somehow reassuring. There is peace to be found in having to stop and observe. In taking a moment to simply be, welcome the experience, and connect with what feels most true. My art is an invitation to ask yourself: what do I see? How does it make me feel? Though my paintings are reflections of my inner world, they are also a means to connect with others — and for others to connect with themselves. True connection happens when we tap into what lies within.

You describe your art as an invitation for viewers to pause and explore. Do you see your work as a reflection of your own emotional journey, or is it more about creating a shared emotional space for viewers to bring their own interpretations?

My art reflects my inner world, always seeking harmony, abundance, and serenity. Painting helps me calm down, recentre myself, harmonise my emotions, and pacify any tensions. The process is very physical too — I often end up covered in paint! The process and the results are the same: it absorbs completely, creating a space where everything can breathe and unfold.

For me it’s a balance of letting go and guiding the process, entering with a plan but also free-styling along the way. With each new layer, the piece evolves in a new direction. Viewers who connect with my art experience something similar: each pause to observe brings a novel perspective, a new cocktail of emotions. Elements assemble and fall into place in a new order each time, guiding the eye along a new visual route. While books tell a linear story where feelings are spelt out, abstract art is a multi-layered adventure, where each viewer’s unique perspective invites them to explore their own emotions.

What advice would you give to other artists who are considering a shift to fine art after working in a different creative field? How did you approach this transition, and what has it brought to your practice?

Transitioning to a different field is hard and scary, because change is hard and scary. But it is essential for growth. I firmly believe that the purpose of the human experience is to learn, communicate, and feel, and none of that happens in stagnation. There’s never a guarantee that things will succeed or fail, but the best guide has been for me to know myself and listening to what feels important, then to find a way to get there. It takes hard work and discipline, but ultimately, the journey itself matters most because we all move at different paces and in our own ways. What counts is taking a chance on whatever feels right in the time. Always keep learning and expanding your circles in ways that resonate with you, as we learn from each other. The more you know, the more you can do.

For me, I still need financial support to fund my artistic journey, but I’m clear with myself that my art is essential to the balance of my life. Whatever I need to do to sustain it, I’ll work to make it happen, with patience and consistency. This journey has been a path toward being truer to myself and giving myself room to expand. I always set small goals, just a few at a time, and work steadily toward them. So take things one day at a time, don’t try to do everything at once. Be clear about the steps you want to take and give yourself the means to reach your goals.

Read the full Interview as beautifully designed spreads in the first Issue of the ArtSloth Magazine (Vol. 1).

To connect with Artist Vee BKL, follow her on Instagram.