PRECEDE: Justine Martin’s colourful home doubles as an art gallery. The Marshall artist chats to ASH BOLT about why life is too short to be beige.
For Justine Martin, the word that best describes her home is ‘colourful’.
Her house in Marshall is immediately recognisable from its purple exterior, and her love of colour is obvious inside.
Most rooms have a splash of colour, whether it be on a wall or a door, with Justine favouring bright colours, such as pink and turquoise.
“Life’s too short to be beige,” she said.
“A lot of people are living in homes that are purely for resale, but that’s not me.
“I love it here and I have no intention of selling any time soon, so I’m going to paint it the way I want it.
“That’s what makes it feel like a home to me.”
It’s not just the paint choice that provides the home with colour.
As a well-known artist in Geelong, Justine’s home also doubles an art gallery of sorts.
More than 50 metres of track line the walls of the hallway and living areas, with more than 50 of her paintings on display.
Although she admittedly came from an “artsy-fartsy” family, Justine only took up painting in 2012 after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“My whole world crashed. I went from a well-paying corporate job to having nothing and solely relying on another human being.
“I was losing control of my life.
“My neurologist said to me that I needed to find a hobby and I always wanted to learn how to paint.
“But it took me about four months to walk through an art studio door. I’d drive there every week and go, ‘nope, I can’t go inside,’ because my anxiety was horrific.
“I was driving home in tears in every week and one day I just thought, ‘what are you doing? Just go inside’.
“I did it and I took to it like a duck to water.”
It wasn’t long before she entered her first art show – the Drysdale Rotary Art Show in April 2012 – and sold her first painting.
Over the following years, she picked up about 40 awards for her art at shows across the state and exhibited her works in galleries.
One of her award-winning works, which took out the first-time exhibitor award at the Zonta Conviction, Commitment and Courage Exhibition in 2016, has pride of place in her home, sitting above her desk in her home office.
The self-portrait has special meaning to Justine.
“I asked everyone on Facebook to describe me in one word, and they came up with 119 words about me,” she said.
“Those words are included in the hair, as well as the symptoms of MS.
“That one won four exhibitions that year but when I went to pick it up, it had been bought.
“They gave me an envelope, with an invoice in it and written on the invoice was ‘Dear Justine, never ever lose sight of the goals and dreams’. Which was really nice.
“It was one of my girlfriends that had bought it and she gave it back to me and made me promise to never sell it.
“It’s a bit narcissistic having your own face above your desk, but that’s why it’s there.”
Justine said she doesn’t think of her home has having rooms – she calls them zones instead – and the office is her least favourite.
She’s much more likely to be found in her studio.
“The studio’s probably my most favourite [zone] because that’s my happy place,” she said.
“Just getting in there and creating stuff and getting my hands dirty, that’s what I love.”
When she first bought the home, the studio was a four-car garage, which she split in half and filled with all of her art supplies.
Along with her own work, the studio is where she hosts her art classes.
One of her most popular classes is finger-painting, which she took up herself after being diagnosed with three different cancers between 2016 and 2017.
“I lost the ability to hold paintbrush and a pen with the cancers,” Justine said.
“It was tough for as an artist, but I kept getting tagged in a whole heap of posts on social media about Iris Scott, who’s an artist overseas who finger paints in oils.
“I thought, ‘oh, I wonder if I can do that with acrylic paint’ and so I tried and painted a frog.
“It was a great feeling, I was like, ‘yes, I can still create art!’
“That’s where it all came from – everyone I showed thought it was really cool and was shocked I could do that with my fingers.
“And I thought I’d better start teaching and showing other people how to do it – because that’s what it’s all about, helping other people.”
The cancer diagnoses came not long after Justine bought her home.
“The day I got the keys for it was the day I found out I could have cancer,” Justine said.
“In 2016 I was diagnosed with livedo reticularis – I was going purple.
“They sent me off to the rheumatologist, who said that it wasn’t lupus or rheumatoid arthritis that was causing it and that it was probably lymphoma.
“That was in the August at the same time as I got the keys to the house.
“I got sent to a dermatologist to confirm it and had a skin check and a biopsy on this tiny mole on my leg.
“They range me the next day and it turned out I had melanoma, which was totally unrelated.
“I ended up with decreased lung capacity and inflammation in all my internal organs – very similar to what people are experiencing now with COVID – and that caused inflammation in my joints, which was why I couldn’t hold a paintbrush and a pen.
“Things that would normally take me couple of hours to do, would take me five days to do because I just couldn’t hold the pen long enough to do it.
“And then a couple of months later I was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and small lymphocytic lymphoma.”
“I had three primary cancers at once, plus another blood condition on top of that.”
However Justine hasn’t let her medical issues holding her back.
Along with her success art career, as an artist and a teacher, she is also a published author, an award-winning resilience coach and soon-to-be children’s book author.
“I’ve written and illustrated a children’s book, which is coming out on July 15, it’s called ‘Same Same but Different’ and it’s all about equality,” she said.
“I sent the book off to 31 publishers and got five contracts back, but none of them would let me use my artwork in anything else.
“I thought, ‘that’s not going to work, why don’t we just start a publishing house of our own?’
“It’s gone from there and we’ve got three books coming out this year.”
‘Same Same but Different’ features Justine’s dachshund Pansy and grandkids and promotes equality.
“I wanted to [write the book] to leave it for my grandkids and I’m big on equality,” Justine said.
“Equality should be normal, but there’s still things like racism around.
“So this is all about teaching my grandkids about equality … and I have some other ideas in mind for books about disability and chronic illness and other things like that.”
Justine said it was a need to prove people wrong that kept her going with all her creative adventures.
“My mum always used to say to my brother and I that there’s no such word as can’t and I think that was the foundation for a lot of my life,” she said.
“If you believe that you can’t do something, you won’t but if you believe that you can, you will.
“You look at a child that’s learning how to walk, no one tells them they can’t do it. They try and try and try until they do it. Yet, as adults, when someone says to you, ‘oh, you can’t do that’, we believe them.
“That’s a false belief.
“I get told all the time that I need to slow down, that I’m doing too much, but I know what I’m capable of, I know what I can do, I know where I’m going in life. So please don’t tell me what I can’t do.
“I think society as a whole, we tend to focus on the negative too much rather than the positive. But it is so much easier being positive and that’s how I get through each and every day.
“I remember when I was diagnosed with MS that the doctor told me I wouldn’t work again and he had clue how wrong he would be.”
