Neryl Walker
Strong, Free & Unbound
Neryl Walker’s Women and Why They Matter
Neryl Walker’s women are confident, mischievous and entirely unbothered by what you think of them — turning up on cosmetics packaging, gin bottles, gallery walls and building-sized murals with equal ease. One of the talents represented by The Drawing Arm, Neryl has built one of the most distinctive visual languages in Australian illustration. We sat down to talk mid-century obsessions, the rock and roll world, and why personal work usually involves a little more nudity.
Written by Allie Portman
Neryl’s studio is, by her own account, filled with vintage everything. Her 1950s home is similarly stocked with the visual culture of the mid-twentieth century — fashion, packaging, typography, music, design objects — accumulated over years of devoted collecting. It is the material evidence of a sustained love affair with an era, and it feeds directly into some of the most energetic, characterful illustration being made in Australia today. The women who populate her work — bold of line, vivid of colour, frequently in various states of liberated undress — owe something to that mid-century visual vocabulary, but they are not nostalgic in any passive sense. They carry their influences lightly, the way a woman who knows her own mind carries everything: with style and without apology. Neryl traces their origins, with characteristic honesty, to her upbringing. “I grew up with three sisters,” she says. “My mum practically raised us on her own, and I think there’s a real strength in that — but we also grew up with a large dose of humour.” Strength and humour, in Neryl’s work as in her family, are not opposites. They are the same thing. Her client list reads like a very good party guest list: Playboy Magazine, Buxom Lips, Four Pillars Gin, Stella Artois, Coca-Cola, Seafolly, Vogue Nippon, Chronicle Books, Thames & Hudson. She is the artist behind the updated Femlin — the iconic Playboy character originally created in the 1950s — a commission that sits at a rather perfect intersection of her mid-century obsessions and her celebration of the female form.
She is also included in Lürzer’s Archive top 200 Illustrators worldwide, the industry’s most respected acknowledgement of commercial illustration excellence. Working across brand commissions and personal work requires, she acknowledges, a different mode of operation. “Working for a brand definitely requires a more considered approach — creating to meet their vision and requirements rather than purely your own,” she says. “Personal work allows a lot more freedom.” She pauses, then adds: “And usually a little more nudity, ha!” It is a line delivered with the easy timing of someone whose humour is as practised as her draughtsmanship. But the discipline is genuine: Neryl is clear that she brings the same energy, personality and “vibes” — her word — to both commercial and personal work. The brand just gets a slightly more clothed version. The mid-century obsession runs deeper than aesthetics. Neryl articulates it as a values position as much as a visual one. “I’m drawn to mid-20th century fashion, design, imagery, packaging, music, typography and colour palettes — pretty much everything,” she says. “It reflects a time when thoughtful design was prioritised, and hand-drawn skill and artistry truly mattered.” She does not need to complete the contrast — it is clear enough. In a moment when AI-generated imagery is proliferating rapidly, Neryl’s commitment to the handmade, the personal and the distinctly human reads as something more than a stylistic preference. It is a statement.
Her characters, she explains, are drawn from the real and the imagined in roughly equal measure. She is inspired by iconic women — historical and contemporary — who carve their own paths and challenge expectations in their own particular way. The art world supplies a good number of them; the rock and roll world supplies the rest. “Women who are confident, mischievous and rebellious definitely float my boat,” she says. One looks at the paintings and believes her entirely. Large-scale murals have become an increasingly significant part of her practice — works for the Darwin Street Art Festival, the Benalla Street Art Festival and Melbourne’s Revolver bar among them — and there is something fitting about Neryl’s women at building scale, looking out over the street with that familiar expression: amused, assured, entirely their own. The work has always been about visibility, in every sense. At mural scale, it becomes impossible to ignore. Neryl Walker is represented by The Drawing Arm illustration agency. Her prints, paintings and originals are available through shop.neryl.com.
@nerylwalker
