He said, everyone has three pots of paint, there's black, yellow and purple.

And he said, I want you to paint a landscape, but it can't look like a landscape.

And at that point, I was like, what the fuck?

Is he talking about. I am welcome to episode 217 of our juice. This is honest, generous and humorous conversations to feed your creative soul and get you thinking with me Louise Fletcher. This week Alice is away in Devon on a little bit of a break and I have a special guest with me. I have

Debbie Taylor Kermin with me who is all the way from New York. Hi Debbie.

Hi there, how are you, Louise? As we can tell, as you will tell as we get into this conversation, Debbie does not have a New York accent, so we'll get into that.

But first I just want to tell you a little introduction to Debbie. I met her or I found her on

Instagram where I became fascinated with her work and I recently was lucky enough to purchase a painting from her and as we were doing

the transaction I asked her I don't suppose you would come on the podcast would you and thankfully she said yes. So Debbie studied art in the UK. She now lives in Harlem in New York City and her work is about I mean I'm going to let you talk about what it's about Debbie, so I won't spoil that, but what I will say is the reason that we thought you would make an interesting guest is that your work has, I would say, a social conscience that your work is very specifically about social issues.

And that is not something that Alice and I particularly talk about, or that particularly plays a big role in our work.

And so we thought it'd be really interesting to have on a guest with a different slant to there are and so here you are.

So would you mind telling us before we go into like your history and everything,

tell us a little bit about what your works about and what you're interested in.

Oh, um, tough one I know.

I know. There's a couple of aspects to you know, like I think, you know, just stylistic wise, you know like I think you know just stylistic wise you know I'm really interested in

the the fine lane between abstraction and figurative you, so I sort of call myself an abstract figurative artist, you know, so I'm really I love abstract painting, but I you know, when, when I was first sort of when I first took Nicholas

Wilton's class, you know, in 2019 I was really doing all the abstracts and loving it, but after I realized that that, you know,

wasn't enough for me that, you know, and there was a kind of pivotal moment,

there was something that happened that made me realize that I really needed to do figures, you know, or that I wanted to do figures, you know, so, but you know, also, you know, I suppose like I do have a social conscience and I and I sort of such a you know my whole thing is about equality for everybody you know if I could sort of say it's like equality for everybody you know and so I just like I I feel that that's sort of something that I need to sort of say in my work you know what I want to sort of say in my work. So I love the story that you tell on, I think it's on your website where you talked about being Scottish as I think we've all gathered by now originally and going

down to central St Martin's in London to study as a youngster and I just had this conversation recently, same school, with another artist

from the north of England who went to Central St. Martin's and described feeling like, what have I just walked into. And can you, for those, people in Britain will probably

understand something of that culture clash, but can you talk a little bit about that

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