There’s something in the forest that I am trying to find: A thing I feel, there in the breeze and the spaces and the tangled edges. As it cannot be firmly grasped with hands nor words, it dwells in the realm of spirit and I reach instead through the language of colour, light and mark.

My current paintings of ‘cosy wild places’ invite viewers to peer close, the same way as when someone speaks softly, you lean in to listen.

I like to share the places where I feel gently held by Mother Nature, such as the forest understorey or a secret riverbank viewed from my kayak.

I build layers of rich colour and organic texture, choosing to relinquish some control over the marks. I add impressionistic flecks that skip across the surface like sunlight across leaf, web or wing. It’s that sense of alive-ness that thrills me. I work mostly in oil paint on linen or wood, and continue to move my practice to sustainable materials (with much experimentation to come on that journey!). For more on this, click the image below to watch video interview, or read it here.

I am currently represented by Splatter Gallery in Canberra, and Bluethumb online gallery.

BACKSTORY

My journey to full-time painter accelerated in 2019 when my husband began his own journey with a particularly life-threatening cancer. His is a miracle story, but living with the ongoing threat of this cancer means living with uncertainty, and has taught us that the only real thing is the present moment. Living to the fullest became less about the to-do list or bucket list and more about experiencing the present in the fullest way possible – for me, tapping into the connectivity of all living things at the energetic level.

The act of creating art is an act of losing oneself in the moment. Also, painting images inspired by places I’ve been, captured in memory or in a photograph, is the act of resurrecting and digging as deeply as possible into that moment.

While art was part of my healing and my path back to the heart from the thinking-space of coping, it has become integral to
my new way of being in the world.