Artist Hayley Gillepsie captures fairytale scenes in her paintings.

Rainbow-coloured houses perched atop mango-shaped mountains, gigantic teacups floating about an emerald sea and cheeky children riding to school on the back of kangaroos.

One could be forgiven for thinking these surreal imaginings, bursting with detail and often hidden messages, belong on a page out Lewis Carroll’s zany adventures of Alice in Wonderland. They’re not, but they do stem from a source that is equally intriguing.

For many, introductions to the talent of English-born local artist Hayley Gillespie won’t be necessary. After all, her unforgettable canvases hang in numerous galleries about the city, Port Douglas and as far afield as Sydney and are instantly recognisable for their quirky subject matter, faultless technique and pure, unabashed vibrancy.

As I step into the trendy Edge Hill café where we’ve planned to meet, I’m thrilled to discover Hayley is every bit as charismatic and warm as her paintings suggest. She greets me with a smile that feels more like a hug before cheerfully pouring out her concerns over looming deadlines.

“As an artist I always worry about not being able to come up with new ideas but it never actually is a problem,” she says laughing.

For this, Hayley has her nine-year-old son Noah to thank.

“A lot of my paintings are based on ideas that Noah has given me by saying or doing funny little things,” she explains.

She cites unforgettable questions such as: ‘Do haircuts hurt’ and: ‘Do you need a driver’s licence to use a screw driver’ among those that have made it on to the canvas.

Another example she offers is the story behind the signature butterflies that often appear in her work.

“Noah once had a pet butterfly. It was born in my studio actually. It came out of its cocoon and then it flew on to his head and it stayed with him until it died,” she remembers.

“Another one I did recently called Schoolaroo came after Noah was telling me his teacher went to another country where they asked if children went to school on kangaroos.”

Not all of Hayley’s ideas are inspired by her mini muse, a revelation so honestly delivered that it has me in stitches.

“A lot of it is actually based on my mishearing stuff,” she admits. “Someone will say something perfectly normal and I’ll think they’ve said something really weird. My sister thinks that it goes in my ears as ordinary stuff, gets totally reprocessed in my brain and comes out as a really odd painting.

“You know I spent quite a long time in China recently looking for a mandarin eye for my friend only to find out when I got back that she had said: ‘Amanda and I’. I do things like that all the time.”

This natural talent for absorbing everyday ideas and experiences and then translating them into whimsical creations is something that has inspired Hayley’s career choices throughout much of her life. 

A painter and drawer from a young age, Hayley says there was never any doubt of her passion for creativity.

“Mum said she would find me in bed all the time with colour pencils sticking out of me, I looked like a pin cushion. That’s just all I did, drawing, painting and colouring every spare minute. I ruined many a carpet,” she giggles.

One of Hayley’s first paid ventures was making ornamental gnomes and selling them to garden centres in England.

“I was only 17 and still living at home and I blocked up my mum’s bathroom sink with cement so she said that career had to end,” the entrepreneurial artist says.

Next it was buying and repainting children’s furniture salvaged from London auction houses and antique stores. It wasn’t before Hayley, who also collects early 20th century toys, added set painter and children’s performer to her growing repertoire of skills.

I point out that there seems to be a common thread stringing her interests together. “Oh yeah, I think there’s definitely a theme going on, I really like working with children,” she says. In fact, Hayley’s love of all things childish is so compelling that she rarely feels a desire to paint anything else.

“I’ve thought a few times about painting adults but I don’t really have any interest in that to be honest,” she explains.

While Hayley’s work has an unmistakably jocular feel about it, the artist says many of her paintings have a serious and sometimes even sinister side to them.

“Even though my work can look like a nice colourful piece of wall furniture, it really is much more than that when I paint it,” she says of her hidden messages. “There’s always something a little bit dark in the painting if you look hard enough.”

One example of these underlying messages that can sometimes go unnoticed is a painting that was in many ways inspired by her own mischievous antics as a child.

“It was one I painted quite a few years ago called Losing Your Head and it was about having a temper tantrum,” Hayley explains. “It was a little girl having a bit of a sulk although it didn’t necessarily look like that until you looked around. She had pulled some heads off some flowers and there was a gnome’s head lying in the grass. I used to be really contrary when I was a kid. If mum told me off I’d be like: ‘It’s OK, that’s fine’ but then I’d go in the garden and pull all the heads off of her roses.”

These impromptu recollections prove more than an excuse for a good belly laugh. They also offer some useful insight into the delightfully weird and wacky workings of one of the country’s fastest developing artists. Though she spent many years working as a muralist when she first settled in Cairns, Hayley has only been painting on canvas for about five years.

To her own surprise, she has experienced phenomenal success in that short space of time. In addition to selling her original works and signed and hand-finished prints, Hayley has two separate lines of greeting card designs sold here and in the UK. She also reveals she has recently secured several large product and fabric design contracts in the US. Despite her immense success with requests for her work spanning not only the country but the world, Hayley remains humble and even doubtful of the following she has created.

“Even now, when people say they know my work I’m surprised,” she says.

For those who don’t know Hayley’s individual style there are several trademark features that give it away. As she explains, many of her paintings will often incorporate fabric patterns inspired by “the freaky dresses and things everyone used to wear” in the ’60s and ’70s that have remained vivid in her memory since childhood.

Likewise, many toys and children’s furniture from her personal collection will make an appearance. Perhaps the most recognisable technique and one of the most intriguing is Hayley’s tendency to hide the faces of the characters she portrays. For this, she says, there is a very good reason.

“If I put a face or an expression on them it’s instantly there. I quite like to leave it up to the person who buys the painting to decide what’s underneath the hat.”

Share this article