An ambition for learning how to row Venetian-style was all it took for Australian street/visual artist Stormie Mills to move from Perth to the famous lagoon city of Venice with public relations extraordinaire wife Melissa Lekias in 2023.

In pursuit of their mutual ideology, “We’d rather live a creative life than have a creative career”, the couple are wholeheartedly embracing life in a third-floor apartment in the Venetian district of Cannaregio.

“It was kind of total madness, really, but all I wanted to do was learn how to row a gondola,” Mills admits to STM.

“I go rowing three times a week and row almost every boat that there is in Venice, from the smallest sandolo up to gondolas . . . There’s a lot of rowing clubs here, and they’re mostly focused on racing, going out into the laguna and practising going really fast, whereas I really like being in the city and taking corners and navigating between boats, so I get a different kind of joy out of it.

“Sometimes I’ll go pick up the boat from the rowing club and then come past home and pick up Melissa and Beanz (their well-travelled, stylish long-haired Chihuahua) from our place, tootling around for an hour or so.”

Like all great things in Mills’ life, he credits Lekias for finding their dream Venetian apartment, formerly inhabited by a university language professor and his photographer wife, who both died, leaving it to be rented furnished with a sizeable library, photography equipment and a room ideal for conversion into an art studio.

“We kind of feel like we’re caretakers,” 56-year-old Mills muses.

The move to Italy came with a caveat of returning to Perth — where he still has his studio — whenever necessary, as it unexpectedly coincided with Art Gallery of WA director Colin Walker extending an invitation to Mills to present his first solo exhibition in an Australian State gallery, titled All The Secrets Are Buried Between The Oceans And The Mountains.

“We were just getting ready to leave Perth, and Colin goes, ‘How would you like to do an exhibition?’m” says Mills, who Walker describes as having an artistic practice of great range.

“After the initial fear of the idea, I remembered how I’d walked into that gallery when I was 21, thinking, ‘Wow, imagine being in here’, and I was only thinking of one work. I never thought in my life that Colin and I would sit down over coffee, and he’d go, ‘What do you want to do? How much space do you need? Let’s go to the gallery, I’ll walk you around the whole building, and you tell me what you want to do’.

“It was just such a simple and instinctive and intuitive kind of feeling and conversation that made me feel like I could do this.”

While Mills has spent four decades shaping the visual language of contemporary urban culture, the portrait artist and painter of character works and landscapes believes the crux and underlying nature of everything he creates extends from the desire to touch an emotion.

Whether it be a picture of a person or of a landscape/seascape, he wants the viewer to feel something from the whimsy, honesty, vulnerability and humanity in his work, which often features a restricted colour palette of black, white, grey and silver.

“I think a lot of it comes from reflection because we all have a view of ourselves,” says Mills, who will be guest of honour at the 2027 Florence Biennale.

“I tend to think that I’m kind of a klutz and not that cool or interesting, and a bit silly. I don’t take myself too seriously, so when I’m looking at people and I see people from that kind of lens, that’s what I’m trying to get.

“We all wear an armour of sorts, don’t we, because we want the world to perceive us in a certain way, or a certain light? The chinks in the armour is what I’m looking at, but in a kind way.”

Having been obsessed as a child by the illustrations of Quentin Blake, Mills began painting in 1984 as he tried to emulate the graffiti murals featured in the film Beat Street, about a kid who moved to New York and painted them to impress a girl.

Entirely self-taught and ill-equipped at the beginning to deal with oil paints and layers, Mills found instant gratification in the freedom of expression, where every wall was a blank canvas to experiment on and an opportunity to try new things.

“It’s a little bit more torturous now,” he laughs.

“Because if I have an idea in my head, getting to that point can be a lot more technical and a lot more challenging, but that’s also the juice of it, that’s the bit that I really love. There’s difficulty in getting to that point. . . but the struggle is worth it.”

Born in Colwyn Bay, Wales, Mills moved to Australia with his family at age three, and says it is no secret his parents dealt with his graffiti and spray-painting ways as a teenager by orchestrating reverse colonialism, sending him back to Wales to live with his grandma Monica when he was 16.

An orphan from India and “the only brown girl in the village” when a missionary brought her to Wales in 1912, Monica is fondly described by Mills as being more of a rebel than he ever was.

A month-long trip from Wales to New York, the spiritual home of street art, in July 1986 opened Mills up to the gamut of social and political aspects driving artists to create, from subway station installations to parkland murals.

He returned from the UK to Perth in time for his 21st birthday, and in 1994 became one of the first street artists invited to participate in an initiative responding directly to the State Government’s anti-graffiti messaging, painting a public mural at the Wellington Street freeway underpass that remains today.

Through the support of Lekias and Wendy Wise, the latter working for the Department of Culture and the Arts at the time, Mills held his first solo exhibition in 1999 at West Perth space Jack Sue, and all 10 artworks sold on opening night.

As fate would have it, Wendy’s daughter Isobel Wise — who was at university in 1999 — now works at AGWA, and Walker asked her to curate All The Secrets Are Buried Between The Oceans And The Mountains once the landmark exhibition was under way.

“He’s such a dedicated creative that I think he would have found his way regardless, but to know that someone in your family was a part of helping guide that and support that is actually quite special,” Isobel Wise says.

“People find their own entry point to his work, because he’s putting so much of himself in it. There’s something vulnerable about what he does in painting, and while people call them ‘characters’, they’re essentially portraits of people, and they’re portraits of people having feelings, whether they’re joyous or challenging feelings.

“A lot of audiences see artists, whether it’s a musician or a singer or a painter, as distant from us, as though they occupy a different world. Whereas I feel like a lot of people can connect with the real-world thinking that Stormie brings to his work.”

Initially pitched to Mills as a survey of his artistic practice, touching on different periods throughout his career, the exhibition became more of a self-reflective survey when the artist revealed his wish to create new work for it.

Pieces that, in their own way, tell stories from across his career, that make connections to people and places that have been really important to who he is and how he makes.

The new body of work comprises two 12m long paintings bookending the exhibition — that are literally the mountains and the ocean — painted on panels bolted together in the studio and then reassembled in the AGWA gallery.

“The first concept sketches that I did for these works were really important to me, to have these big scapes and for everything else to be between them,” Mills says of the exhibition’s multi-layered immersive environment, which will also feature a site-specific component.

“I painted those in Perth and the rest of the (new) work was all painted in Venice.”

Based on Mills’ long-held idea of secrets being something we all hold — where not all secrets are bad — his inspiration has stemmed from Perth being a long city strip built between the hills and the sea, filled with millions of people and just as many secrets.

“For many years I worked on found objects and did a lot of works in drawers, thinking it was a place people would hide secrets, but now I think people bury secrets within them in the same way as you can bury things in the garden, or in the sand dunes, or in the woods, or wherever it may be,” he says.

“There’s also a series of portraits that I’ve done of friends and associates of mine who I have come to know through graffiti and street art. I wanted to highlight the fact that there’s a lot of documentation on what people who do graffiti and street art do on walls, but there’s not much documentation in terms of who these people themselves are. So the idea for me was to paint these people that I know. . . to paint the secret of them.”

Completing the conversation are artworks curator Wise has sourced from collectors spanning Mills’ career, hitting on different moments and ideas within his practice in relationship to the new work.

“It was interesting to go through, and go, ‘Wow, I did a lot of work’. I was really prolific and there were periods of time where I’d have five exhibitions in a year with 26 pieces in each exhibition,” Mills shares.

“It brought back a lot of memories, because obviously all those works are connected to my life and the stories of things that I saw, people who I knew, and things that were happening. It was like looking through an old photo album.

“Hopefully when people come to see the exhibition, they’ll get an inkling into the way my studio is layered, and my thinking is layered.

“I’m looking forward to being able to say ‘I’ve had a solo exhibition in the State gallery, and for me, it was a huge honour’.”

All The Secrets Are Buried Between The Oceans And The Mountains is at AGWA from August 1-November 8.