Improvisation, Intuition and the Art of Showing Up: Q&A with Amanda Billing

In this thoughtful and candid Q&A, Amanda Billing reflects on her evolving creative journey. Fluidly moving between acting, painting, and photography, she touches on how themes of improvisation, vulnerability, and learning have remained central throughout. She discusses the power of midlife creativity, the role of community, and what success means when you’re charting your own path. As part of the Emerging Women in Art event, her insights offer an honest look into what it takes to keep showing up, sharing your work, and staying open.

How has your creative process changed over the years and what has stayed the same?

I have a few different creative/artistic practices so this one could be a complex answer. But maybe that’s the answer! I’ve moved between different practices out of a combination of necessity, curiosity, maybe even boredom.

When I became a professional actor I barely had any hobbies, just dormant creative energy sources from school days. Once I’d been working on Shortland Street for a while, I realised I needed to start making art again - not  craft or practical creative arts but actual pick-up-a-paint-brush type stuff, so I started to going to night classes at what used to be Art Station.

When Matthew Browne set up his art school on Great North Road, I was able to begin year-long study, paying particular attention to the figure, something I’d done since I was small. Browne gives its year-long students a grounding in processes which lead to us developing our own artistic voice and using the human body as a starting point has enabled me to explore printmaking and watercolour media as well as painting with acrylic.

I may cycle between different creative activities but something which ties together acting, painting and portrait photography is improvisation. Moment by moment response characterises my process, regardless of which kind of medium I’m working in. 

Another thing that seems to be at the heart of all my processes is learning. I think exploration has been at the heart of my creative processes my whole life. It’s natural for kids to be focused on experimentation - I endeavour to retain this open, curious approach as an adult. In fact, recently I ran a drawing workshop in my studio and I’m really looking forward to sharing more of the things I do to encourage making, risk-taking and and embracing new things.

What role does vulnerability play in your creative work, and in your conversations with other artists?

I think vulnerability hits all of us artists at some point. If it doesn’t, we may not being growing. 

Perhaps emerging artists and experienced artists encountering new audiences tend to feel the blow of vulnerability a bit harder. Any time we try something new (a new subject, a new medium, show with a new gallery), every time we feel we might have something to lose or we’ve chosen a new path, there can be an anxiety that we might fall short of the mark, fail, be rejected and so on.

Vulnerability is the essence of acting and funnily enough there’s something freeing in that openness, in the performance context anyway. When you feel wide open and connected, you know you’re really doing your job properly. And you can explore vulnerability with some safety, because you have a script. Often in real life, vulnerability can be intense because I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Uncertainty leaves us open to things out of our control. I think uncertainty is also part of my creative process - perhaps it’s close to the heart of both exploration and improvisation.

Revelation can be powerful stuff, whichever medium we work in as artists. Vulnerability can allow an artist to accept their “self”: their particular personality and energy, their interests and concerns, their obsessions and stylistic tendencies.

With art-making, I tend to reach compulsively for the new. Because I share this on social media I do feel vulnerable sometimes. Possibly, it’s oversharing. Perhaps I should guard my processes more closely. I figure it will help somebody, somewhere. Maybe a blocked artist will finally get a copy of The Artist’s Way, or sign up to a course at Browne (or come to Drawing Club with me).

I think there’s a unique power in sharing our thoughts and feelings about our work with a wider audience of people who don’t know us well. This vulnerability helps us stand up for ourselves and our work, and strengthens our convictions about what our work is about.

I have a couple of painter friends, both further along the path than I am (if there is a path), whom I speak with regularly. Being able to talk honestly with them, in private, about my process as I grow as an artist has been so helpful. I appreciate their perspective and reassurance. Emerging artists feel vulnerable so much and when we have the support of people, we grow in confidence.

What unique perspectives do you think women bring to the art world, especially those still finding their voice?

I don’t know much about the art world, really. I know my community of emerging artists, supportive gallerists, fellow students and wonderful teachers. I think that there are lots of different “art worlds”. I do know that there’s always room for us to come and go from whichever art world we have access to, to share our preoccupations/obsessions via our own personal visual language. We make the world beyond the art world more beautiful, mysterious, provocative, inspiring.

I think women can be wonderful community-builders. In my personal experience, we represent 90% of art classes - that’s lot of potential emerging artists! We’re good at corralling each other to help launch things. It’s in our DNA to be nurturing and supportive. We are good at creating shared studios and group shows. We dominate the emerging art world in New Zealand, as far as I can tell.

Many women work in arts admin and in galleries and, in a world where artwork made by men still sells at auction at higher prices across the board, the more women employed in all corners of the art world, the better.

To be honest though, I’m a little bit “old school” about the artist gender thing. Like, 1950s American Abstract Expressionist old school, where women like Joan Mitchell bridled at the idea that being a woman somehow made your work different, that there was such a thing as a “woman artist”.

I think it’s an interesting thing to do though, to classify people, to group them together in context. I’m slightly wary of this tendency though - or perhaps I take it for granted that identity influences content and style so I look past femininity, reaching for something else (in the dark, mostly). The fact that I’m a woman who paints women (who are invariably naked) may be an important factor to someone “reading” my artwork but that’s not consciously what my work is about.

Age is more important to me than gender, I think midlife women - and men - have important things to share with a world apparently obsessed with youth (more on that later). 

With your different creative pursuits, how has your understanding of what it means to ‘succeed’ as an artist evolved over time?

Success looks less like fame and fortune and more like commitment for me these days. Staying in the game. Being willing to enter new territory with courage. Deciding to begin a challenging project and following through.

Fame and fortune do still matter to me though - I’d be lying if I said all the red dots on the walls in my 2024 solo show didn’t make me feel like I “won art”. But that success was actually about keeping a long-standing promise to myself; it was almost totally about righting some personal artistic “wrongs” and proving to myself that I could set a date, make the work, have the opening. Even if I hadn’t sold anything, I would have succeeded. The red dots were the cherries on the top of a profound personal experience.

What does success look like for me in 2025? Being asked to moderate the Frame gallery panel. Deciding to hold a drawing workshop in my studio. That was actually huge for me. Every seat at the drawing table was filled - technically a win - but having “the balls” to do it in the first place, to conquer impostor syndrome and step back into teaching (drawing this time, not high school Geography) and then to have people tell me they want to come back: sweet success.

Recognition matters but it doesn’t have to be a name in lights, it can just be an instagram friend sending a supportive message, standing back to observe a body of small work I made, feeling closer to other artists, feeling confident enough to practice in public.

How can we better support emerging women artists - as a community, as collectors, and as fellow creatives?

From my point of view, it’s about visibility and accessibility to opportunities for development. 

When galleries host evenings like our Emerging Artist panel, this places a spotlight on women and we can get a sense of the mind and heart of the woman behind the work. 

Conversations like panels and podcasts (even this Q&A) help emerging artists sort our thoughts and clarify what matters to us. We are given an opportunity to think more deeply about our work and tell our story. The podcast “The Creative Kind” featured two emerging artists recently and many of the guests on the show are women. When I went on the show it was such a powerful experience for me - it really helped me to mature as a creative and it introduced new people to my creative world.

Removing barriers to exhibition spaces is important, holding openings at times that work well for parents, perhaps providing mentorship opportunities between emerging artists and established artists who are willing to be torch bearers. 

I think women in the arts currently do so many good things with and for each other - it’s a matter of creating community structures for beginning artists of any age. In fact, age is an aspect of artistic identity which I would like reframed, possibly even more than I want more opportunities for women artists.

No disrespect to young artists, but mid life emerging artists, men and women, could do with more dedicated support. We have kids, mortgages, and parents who need our help, so creating events, doing (free) open exhibition calls, establishing grants, and offering residencies for emerging artists over 45 would balance scales which, to me, seem to be tipped towards youth currently. 

I would like there to be broader recognition that mid-life is when many people - especially women - step finally, courageously, into a new creative era. It’s a renaissance, but we are not children (and usually the ones we have are leaving the nest). We have the maturity and inner resources to cut an artistic path ourselves, but we benefit from having company on the way.