Aprill Enright-Allen is an Australian artist living in Brunswick East, Melbourne. Growing up in Sydney with artistic and commercially-minded parents with a ticket writing and screenprinting business, it may seem obvious for Aprill to get involved in art. Although she got involved in the family business from time to time and took occasional weekend workshops in watercolours and acrylics, Aprill was focused on building her career in the burgeoning technology space through the 90s and 2000s. Working in technical support and consulting roles with companies including One.tel, Optus and the Police Bank she tried to balance her analytical mind with the creative, attending workshops and attempting further education around shift work and family commitments. Aprill's several unfinished attempts at further arts education include the College of Fine Art in 1999, a photography certificate at Goulburn TAFE in 2006, and the Victorian College of the Arts in 2018.
Moving from Sydney's inner-west in 2005, Aprill, her husband and their two young boys spent a number of years living in regional NSW before resettling in Victoria's Brunswick East in 2013. The area had a vibe familiar with Sydney's Newtown and Erskineville, and all the colour and character to nurture an untapped creative mind. Eventually, in 2019, Aprill tried another way to access that and found local established artist, Jacqui Stockdale. With Jacqui's ongoing mentorship and encouragement, Aprill has finally found her way.
2020’s serial lockdowns provided the right circumstances for discipline to prevail. Taking virtual life drawing sessions and online workshops by Michael Carson, Sarah Sedwick, Zin Lim and more, Aprill got into a rhythm of painting or drawing every weekend at the dining table through those lockdowns. This resulted in her first small body of work titled, Isolation State, which has been shown in a shared Almost Solo exhibition at Incube8r Gallery in Fitzroy. Not quite a group show, not quite a solo show, Almost Solo brought five individual artists together to exhibit their bodies of work in a shared space.
Now that Aprill's two sons are teenagers and self-sufficient, she works from Northcote Art Studios, providing the space and opportunity to work on larger canvases. She favours oils, sometimes with acrylic underpaintings and is drawn to contemporary portraits. She thinks this comes from a need to better understand and express her own emotions by looking at those of others, and the underlying theme is often the female voice rising up against male privilege.