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500 Faces: Creating a Social History One Person at a Time What would you write if someone gave you 100 words and asked: What is it like to be alive today? Not what do you do for a living. Not what are your hobbies? Not tell me your life story. Just: What is it like to be alive today? That is one of the questions at the heart of photographer and artist Nigel Walker's fascinating project, 500 Faces. I talked to Nigel about the project in Episode 5 of the Liz Dees Art Podcast, a

We take photographs constantly. Our phones are cameras. Our cameras are computers. We photograph our food, our children, our dogs, our holidays, our feet, our coffee, our art, our dinner, our bloody dinner again because the first one didn't look quite right. And then we rarely look at most of them ever again. That was one of the questions that came up when I was talking to photographer and artist Nigel Walker for Episode 5 of the Liz Dees Art Podcast: Are we drowning in photo

If you make art but don't feel entitled to call yourself an artist, you're definitely not alone. One of the questions I asked Andi Dawson during Episode 4 of my podcast was: Have you ever felt uncomfortable describing yourself as an artist? Her answer was immediate. Yes. Every single time. And I completely understood. Because I've felt it too. In fact, I think there is something really interesting about the word artist. It isn't just a description. For many of us, it feels li

What happens when you are trying to be a mother, a worker, a creative, a daughter, a partner… and still somehow expected to find time for yourself? This was one of the questions I found myself coming back to during my conversation with children's author, illustrator, poet and teacher Andi Dawson on Episode 4 of the Liz Dees Art Podcast. We called the episode The Impossible Juggling Act. And honestly, sometimes that feels like exactly what being a woman is. Juggling. Except no

We live in a world of endless scrolling. Videos auto-play. Photos flash past. Algorithms compete for our attention every second of the day. We’re constantly encouraged to consume more content, more quickly. So where does art fit into all this? This question emerged naturally during my conversation with artist Poppy Tuovinen on Episode 3 of the Liz Dees Art Podcast. In a world overflowing with faces, is portraiture still relevant? I believe it is. Perhaps more than ever. The a

Liz Dees and Poppy Tuovinen talk faces! Every day we see hundreds—perhaps thousands—of faces. On social media. On television. Walking through town. In family photographs. In advertising. We barely notice just how surrounded we are by human faces. Yet when we step into an art gallery and stand in front of a painted portrait, something different happens. We stop. We look. We wonder. In Episode 3 of the Liz Dees Art Podcast, I sat down with artist and printmaker Poppy Tuovinen t

Artists often talk about the dangers of commercialisation. But during my recent podcast conversation with artist David Lau, we explored a less obvious question: Could earning money from your art actually protect your creativity? The answer might surprise some people. What Does Creative Freedom Really Cost? Many artists dream of complete creative freedom. The ability to experiment. The ability to take risks. The ability to spend weeks or months developing ambitious projects. Y

For many artists, makers, musicians and creatives, there comes a moment when a difficult question arises: What happens when money enters the equation? Does turning your passion into a business damage the thing that made you love it in the first place? Or is earning money from your creativity simply part of becoming a professional artist? These were some of the questions I explored recently with artist David Lau on my podcast. Creativity Before Commerce One thing David and I h

The myth of the “young artist” is everywhere. We’re taught to imagine creative success as something that happens early: the teenage prodigy, the art school graduate, the musician discovered at 21. But for many artists, creativity doesn’t truly come into focus until much later in life. In the first episode of the Liz Dees Art Podcast, artist Liz Dees sat down with painter and former BBC radio presenter Phil White to talk about midlife creativity, starting again, and why life e