Fleur Steinberg, the head of client integration at Foxtel Media, likes to set herself an annual challenge. Last year it was stand-up comedy. This year, she’s back painting, inspired by the creativity of her young children.
She loves television and finds that her day job also helps her creative side.
“I studied visual arts at the Queensland University of Technology but landed in media around the turn of the century (this one not the last),” she says.
“Although I started in media sales I’ve always gravitated towards the creative side of the industry. As head of client integration I’ve found a role that perfectly matches my love of television and services my creative side.”
Painting is a passion. She’s had a few small shows and sold a few pieces over the years, mostly landscapes and mostly bought by family and friends.
The painting was shelved for a few years while a career and children filled all available spaces in the day.
However, the children are now in school and starting to express their own creativity.
“I’ve started painting again,” she says. “The kids have inspired me, I think all children are geniuses. If only I could draw like them. Little baby Picasso’s.”
She and her daughter, Sophie, aged five, have been collaborating on paintings, including watercolours of flowers and portraits of dogs, inspired by the family puppy.
“I either get Sophie to start, to get that beautiful innocent line and then I use colour to gel the work together,” she says.
“Alternatively, I’ve started outlines of more realistic pictures (such as dogs) and have Soph ‘colour in’.
“My son is also creative, but he’d rather write poems than paint (his works on COVID lockdown are particularly haunting).
“Children have the ability to create line and abstract forms akin to an abstract expressionist – the trick is knowing when to take it away from them.
“My house is now a gallery with every inch of every wall covered in mine, theirs or our paintings and I couldn’t think of a better expression of creativity and love.”
She believes that five-year-olds are the most brilliant painters and creators.
“You'll never be as brilliant as you are when you're five. And the trick with painting with a five-year-old is taking the painting away from them when it's done,” she says.
“With my daughter, I'll start a painting and then I'll give it to her to add her colours to it.
“She'll give it back to me and I'll add something to it. And then we just keep working like that until it's finished and I'll give her a colour palette to work with.”
She spends a lot of time at the Art Gallery of NSW with her children.
“It's stepping outside the rat race and getting a different perspective,” she says. “And that's all art is, right, it's perspective.”
She has her favourites at the gallery. “I'm really big on Australian abstract expressionists so I love the Australian wing of the NSW Art Gallery. So all of the Russell Drysdales and William Gibsons and the era from impressionism through to the 60s.
“I think Australia has a really beautiful history with art and a really close connection to the landscapes.
“A lot of the stuff I do is landscapes. It's meditative, it's internal. There is a mindfulness to it, whereas the comedy was frantic, a release.
“This year, being that it's a COVID year and we're in a lockdown and things are completely different, is a nice time to be mindful and slow down and re-skill.”
Last year she did stand-up comedy, one of those things that looks easy but is hard to pull off.
“I’m always seeking a creative challenge, something that can help me grow and see life in a different light,” she says.
“In 2019 I took a Shakespearean approach to my personal life by creating comedy out of tragedy - and basically airing all my grievances on a stage in front of hundreds of people as a stand-up comic.”
She says signing up to Pitch2Punchline, a media and marketing industry gala, and performing on stage at the Opera House was a defining moment.
“When would I ever get an opportunity like that again?” she says.
“I thought it would be a one off, like doing Tough Mudder (2018 challenge, never again).
“However the stage is exciting, making people laugh is addictive and observing human behaviour through jokes can be therapeutic.”
Beyond the Opera House, the crew and comics from Pitch2Punchline kept performing and raising money for charity and continued to therapise her life on stage.
“But comedy is bloody hard,” she says. “Five minutes of laughs takes a long time to perfect, and I can’t say I’ve got the perfect five yet.”
She wanted to do something that put her out of my comfort zone, so she enrolled in a course at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA). At the same time, the training would also help with presentation skills and confidence.
“Then there was the call for people to do the Pitch2Punchline and I thought, ‘I've done the training. It can't be that hard’.
“And who gets the opportunity to perform at the opera house, right? So I did it. I performed at the Opera House. It was pretty insane.”
It would take her several months to get a five-minute piece of content nailed down.
“Now the difference between that and a lot of the young kids who were doing it is that they were going out every two or three times a week to open mic nights and practising,” she says.
“I just couldn't do that being a single parent at home with my kids.
“I found that it was really confronting being a single parent, going to a comedy club and performing like that a couple of times a week. It wasn't natural.
“It took a lot of effort … being funny when most of the time the audience is 22. How do you tap into that zeitgeist and still be authentic to yourself?
“I have so much respect for actual comedians who spend their whole lives doing it because you realise how much work goes into what they actually do.”
She told lots of little stories, each one with a punchline. “There's so many different ways to do comedy.
“Some people it's just one long story and there's only one punchline at the end after 10 or 15 minutes, but then other people do like joke after joke after joke after joke.
“For me, over five minutes, there will probably be four parts to it. And each part would be a little story with a little joke.”
A lot of comedy is raw and personal because “the best comedy is personal”.
She wrote about divorce.
“I probably wouldn't want to repeat any of those here today,” she says. “It was a way to really air all my grievances on a stage. That's why I don't do it anymore.”
She found it helped but it was very confronting. “I just kept putting myself out there to keep doing it almost to prove something to myself … to really get the jokes out of my system.
“I did it about 10 times on stage at comedy clubs. Each time I did a different set and getting five minutes of content that’s funny and relatable to a wide range of people is so challenging.
“And also to remember it. I have a full-time job, two children and I am a single parent. So it got a bit hectic last year.
“I also found that I just didn't want to talk about it anymore. I was done. I had got it all out of my system. I've moved on.
“I guess the comedy was the external creativity and the painting is very internal creativity.”
Her son loves that she did comedy. When she studied at NIDA, part of the course was to be a clown.
“Clowning is really, really difficult and people who are proper clowns go to the French school of clowning, like Rowan Atkinson and Sacha Baron Cohen,” she says.
She thought her son and his friends would be perfect at being clowns. “So I went into his kindie class -- he was five at the time -- and taught 30 kids how to be clowns.”
She finds that the creative work she does after hours helps her day work.
“The other day I was working with a client on a shoot for next week and they needed storyboards to get approved from their boss’ boss,” she says.
“And we didn't have an illustrator so I did the storyboards, which was actually a bit of a guilty pleasure to sit down for an hour and draw some pictures at work.
“And comedy has helped with coming up with content creation ideas for millennials. I'm stepping out of my world into their world, that helps me to come up with better insights.
“I really am lucky I don't find that battle between work and home. It's really for me. And working from home, it's all just blurred into one. I just am so grateful and lucky to have the job that I have.
“I've sold more creative campaigns (during the coronavirus crisis) in these six months than I have in the last four years.
“And I just think that because people need us to be agile and they need us to think outside the square, creativity has really been a source of strength for me during this time. I just don't see how you can work in a creative industry without having creative hobbies.”
What next?
“Opera Singing in 2021? Who knows.”
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