In the painting, a cobbled path leads into a gulf of shadows. It’s a starless evening, and there on the right side is a window, casting the path in muted and soft yellow light.
This is only the visual surface of Night Window, an oil on canvas painting by Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Christopher Kerley.
When I visited a gallery in Elsternwick, I found he’s not the only artist trying to make a living.
I met with Sossy Kinderman, a painter who supports herself by channelling creativity in both individual commissions and running an art studio.
Both painters shared their artwork, their lives, and concerns about the art industry with me.
While balancing a day job, Kerley worked on an exhibition titled "Recent Paintings", featuring in Flinders Lane Gallery (FLG) until September 20.
The gallery first opened its doors in 1989, and has since kept its ethos of making high-quality Australian artwork accessible.
“Getting the show off Flinders Lane has been really important for me to sort of solidify a body of work,” Kerley said.
Moving from Perth, Kerley studied a Bachelor of Arts and Fine Arts at Monash University. He explored artists who continue to inspire him, such as Australian painters John Brack, known for his modernist artwork The Car (1955), and Peter Booth, renowned for his surrealist piece, Painting (1977).
In 2024, Kerley’s artwork collection Exploration 24 echoes his greatest inspirations in tone and mood.
One of the oil paintings — Road over Merri Creek — reveals a shy, quaint house at the bend of a road. Verdant and mossy greens bubble over each other from the road’s edge to the murky creek below. Brushed upon the canvas, a storm brews above, heavy grey clouds balloon and swell in the sky, charging the painting with its restraint over nature that threatens to brim over the pavement and shelter.
In his work, Kerley defamiliarises common suburban sites, occupying the space between intimacy and distance with his artistic subject, yet when I asked about the meaning of his artwork, Kerley understates its meaning/value.
“I suppose if you were going to describe it, it’d be kind of a modernist aesthetic," he said. "But I mean does that even hold up today? Is modernism dead? Is post-modernism alive? Are we beyond post-modernism? Like, what does it all mean?”
Kerley was also a finalist for the 2025 Lethbridge Landscape Prize for his painting, Edge of the Suburbs.
The piece features a grassy plain, which stretches towards houselights that speckle the horizon. A tree is painted with bright, almost acidic limes and viridescent, darkening emerald shades. There are no people, only a street at the forefront with a crossing. Just as with light, there is constant play with presence and absence.
Suburbia, here, is an artistic ground for experimentation for Kerley.
“I’ve got access to those spaces [the suburbs] around me and kind of what I interact with on a daily basis, walking around my own suburb, walking to work when I’m traveling,” Kerley said.
There’s a psychological attraction to suburbia and a sense of practicality in the artwork, and in this practicality, Kerley shares that financial support is the main thing needed for independent artists.
A 2025 report by RMIT University found that visual arts and craft workers are leaving the sector due to unstable employment, low-wages and lack of support.
This also explains why of over 330,000 workers in the creative economy, only 31 per cent are actually doing work in industries like arts and fashion.
And why for Sossy Kinderman, choosing art as a career was not so straightforward.
She shared her journey from studying art throughout high school, to being a practicing nurse, to working in cosmetic surgery.
Only now, with her Elsternwick studio — Sossy and Canvas — run by Kinderman and her husband, Steve, is she fully dedicated to painting and sharing art with others.
For her, being an artist was a long-held dream.
“My mum says she remembers when she took me to kindergarten and my face when I saw the easel there and how excited I was.”
Originally Kinderman painted artwork in a realist style and focused on portraiture, until she received commissions requesting abstract art, and for the last seven years she’s been developing her work according to that movement. She also paints Judaica art by commission.
“I always thought I know how to paint. I’m a good painter, so it should be easy to teach someone to paint. And I always found that coming quite natural to me,” Kinderman said.
It’s not that engagement with the arts in Melbourne has waned.
In 2022, the National Arts Participation Survey by Creative Australia found 97 per cent of Victorians aged 15 or over engage in artistic events.
Yet how often Victorians engage with visual arts throughout the year impacts how stable artists are financially.
To make a living, Kinderman caters events in her studio, offers 'paint-n-sip' classes and educational workshops.
On each wall, large canvases feature generous and textured spans of colour. Painted with a palette knife, her abstract art rises from the canvas, creating movement and a sense of immediacy.
“I feel like I’m using my full talent now … and I feel also we’re put here on this world to help other people. And I definitely feel that [with the studio].”
In their advice to young artists in Melbourne, both Kinderman and Kerley encourage aspiring artists not to give up.
Kinderman said that even out of trying ten new experiences, only five work out, that it’s worth it for those five things.
“If you’re stuck doing something that you don’t like, find something that you do like, and push through it,” she said.
Meanwhile, Kerley observed that at times nothing will happen, until something good does, which gives you the impetus to being an artist.
“Just keep going. That's the best advice I can give, really,” he said.
Despite the lack of funding, both Kinderman and Kerley are hopeful for the future of visual art in Melbourne.
And as I was leaving Flinders Lane Gallery and Sossy’s studio, that same feeling of hope stayed with me too.