The painter William McKinnon and the cult eyewear designer Sunshine Bertrand live in the north of Ibiza with their two children, Lucky and Stella. L&rsquo;OFFICIEL IBIZA&rsquo;s Maya Boyd caught up with the Australian couple at their design-driven home near Cala Mastella to talk influences, inspiration and the allure of sleeping beneath the stars.

Your fields are quite different but you&rsquo;re both at the top of your game. How did you get there?
WM: I had an unusual path as I&rsquo;m a self-taught artist. I come from a very creative family - my mother and grandfather were both painters &ndash; but there was a healthy dose of realism instilled in me too. When I was younger, I took jobs where I could work in art but also get paid. I worked as an artist&rsquo;s assistant and for a print maker. I worked at Christie&rsquo;s while I was at university. And then I enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art and Design in London as a mature student when I was 29. In hindsight I&rsquo;m glad, because I cobbled together my own education which gave me a unique language.

The three suns Acrylic, oil and automotive paint on linen 220 x 160 cm To be shown at Art Basel Miami with Simon lee

Double dipper(v) 200 x 265.jpeg Double dipper Acrylic, oil and automotive enamel on linen  2014 -2022 200 x 260 cm 2022

Consciousness Acrylic, oil and automotive enamel on linen  2014 -2022 180 x 160 cm 2022

King Lear  184 x 224 Acrylic, oil and automotive enamel on linen  2014 -2022 Aqcuired by Art Gallery os South Australia

Mother and child  Acrylic, oil and automotive enamel on linen  200 150cm

Home and Away 200 x 150  Acrylic, oil and automotive enamel on linen  2019

SB: My path is not so conventional either. I studied fine art and painted while working in the art world in Australia. From there I was styling for some magazines before I found my way into trend forecasting when I moved to London. I worked with WGSN specifically on eyewear, Topshop and the in-house with Victoria Beckham and my path into the luxury world became quite clear. My clients have included Kenzo, Givenchy, Chloe, Bottega Veneta and now Zimmerman.

You&rsquo;re both from Melbourne. How did you end up together and living in Ibiza?
WM: Sunshine and I went to school together! We&rsquo;ve known each other since we were kids. We didn&rsquo;t reconnect until much later in our lives, but there&rsquo;s a lot of shared history there, which is a really grounding feeling. When Sunshine moved to Ibiza it seemed like the obvious thing for me to do, too.&nbsp;
SB:&nbsp;I&rsquo;d been coming to Ibiza for 10 years when I was living in London. The usual story. But every time the aeroplane door opened it just felt like home and I was in the flow. I&rsquo;d started my design studio in London, and I was traveling a lot to Milan and Paris. I just thought, &lsquo;why travel from London when I could base myself here instead?&rsquo; Plus I was craving living in nature. When I arrived here, I dragged my bed out into the forest and slept under the stars every night for three months, to recharge. I kept bringing more and more suitcases from London until one day I just thought, &lsquo;oh, I live here.&rsquo;.

How does your Australian background inform your work?
WM: I spent two years in central Australia and the Kimberly, working with remote indigenous communities. I was curious to spend time with senior indigenous artists before they passed away. Aboriginal art traditions date back 50 or 60 thousand years and because they have a non-written culture, all their history and stories are passed down through songs and paintings. I thought, &lsquo;why am I travelling around the world when there's this unbelievably rich and fascinating culture in my backyard and I&rsquo;ve hardly seen any of it? There was a real sense of coming to terms with a very contested and problematic history, which is still being grappled with. I worked as a field officer at Papunya Tula which was the first indigenous art centre, and I would spend three weeks out of every four out in these in these remote communities mixing paint for indigenous artists and watching them work. Learning from them. The elders would ask me, &lsquo;why are you here?&rsquo; And it was an interesting question because it's like, why are you somewhere which isn't where you're from? It&rsquo;s been a narrative that has continued to inform my work.
SB:&nbsp;The Australian lifestyle is a huge source of inspiration for me. It&rsquo;s all about freedom and movement and the outdoors. Happiness. Sunshine. There&rsquo;s an element of easy living and effortlessness which I try to convey in my work. A life where you&rsquo;re in the open air, responding to the elements and active all the time. And I&rsquo;m working all year, because when it&rsquo;s summer here it&rsquo;s winter there and so on. Four collections, shows, resort, cruise &ndash; working in both hemispheres means it never stops.

Sunshine Bertrand, photography by Jenny Van Sommers

How does living in Ibiza influence your work?
SB:&nbsp;Ibiza really opened up space and time for my creativity. I was too busy in London, having a great time but depleted. I was feeling a lot of masculine energy in terms of my work. I needed to slow down and I wanted to tune in to my feminine side and be more grounded. I embarked on a pretty fearless spiritual quest when I arrived and that really shifted things for me. It felt logical to work remotely. I&rsquo;ve been doing it for eight or nine years now. Some clients who felt that it was a bit unregulated to begin with but others, like Chloe, saw it as an amazing, on-brand message. I get inspiration everywhere in Ibiza; from what people are wearing, from the landscape, reflections in the water, and while I&rsquo;m swimming. I swim a lot, it clears the mind and opens up to dreamtime.&nbsp;
WM: Ibiza can be quite floaty, and I need to stay very, very disciplined with my work schedule to combat that. Artists tend to be quite emotional and easily affected by their surroundings. I keep a strict five-day working week and that helps me to process how I&rsquo;m feeling. I counter the waves of people and party energy by just getting my head down and working. It&rsquo;s good for the work and it's good for me. And it adds up - painting is not some magical flash of inspiration. It's an accumulation of good hours. Being here has been good for my work because I&rsquo;m close to a lot of art centres like London and Basel, but I have relative anonymity and freedom. There are two distinct phases of creativity for me: being open and stimulated and then carrying out the work. My work is really an expression of me grappling with my experience of the world, with something chaotic &ndash; like Ibiza &ndash; and trying to create some sort of order around it. It&rsquo;s my own distorted reality coming through.

How does life look for you right now? 
SB: &nbsp;Our son Lucky has just turned three, he is pretty wild and definitely a free range Ibiza kid. He&rsquo;s not sure what to do indoors, outdoors is his space. He tinkers away in the forest and has a great reverence for nature. He has his own drawer of tools and an electric sander. He loves to build and has a wonderful imagination. Stella is our baby, she&rsquo;s wondrous and her middle name is Sunday, as she has that kind of dreamy energy. We love seeing life through their lens. It's inspiring. I&rsquo;m working right now on a sustainability report to help promote within the eyewear industry cleaner manufacturing and materials. We publish these yearly and also work with the Copenhagen Fashion Summit on projects to increase awareness around these issues. Will and I are heading to Japan again this year and to Norway and probably to Miami and Venice for the art fairs. We have a shared passion for art and architecture, so these kind of family trips are a real bonding experience for us. I also travel a lot with my work. Ibiza is a dream to come back to after each trip away. It's paradise.
WM: I've been working with Simon Lee for the last few years. He has fantastic galleries in Mayfair and Hong Kong and a place in Ireland and he has clients all over. He took me to Basel three months ago and I had a solo show there and I also had solo shows in Beijing and Miami. It&rsquo;s exciting. We just spent five months with our families in Australia. With Ibiza and the kids, life feels pretty complete.

A major solo show of William MacKinnon&rsquo;s work opens tomorrow (September 29th) at Australia&rsquo;s <a href="https://instagram.com/hugomichellgallery?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=">Hugo Michell Gallery</a>.&nbsp;Two out of the six works on display have already been acquired by major museums. MacKinnnon also has further solo shows next year in London and Los Angeles.

A design for life: William Mackinnon and Sunshine Bertrand

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