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'Above is an early illustration when watercolour became my first love in painting' Watercolour of Piazza in Fabriano, Italy 2019-20 In the town of Fabriano, Italy, a 14th century town in the region of Marche, the world famous European centre of paper production during the Middle Ages, a small watercolour gallery hides among stone corridors, cobblestone paths and lingering medieval history. The International Watercolour Museum. I stil

This story begins with a girl working at a gallery in a small town on the south coast (me). An old man and widower came in off the street, beelined for me, ignoring the art on the walls, and inquired, "Do you acquire frames here?" Initially, I thought to dismiss him, (clearly this is a gallery, not an antique store!) but there was an interior nudge of empathy that came over me, to be a little extra gentle and actually give him the time of day. So, I asked further questions. "

Florentine Mezza Luna taken during Art School, at 'Santa Marta' Monastery Florence 2023 We tend to take for granted milestones in the scientific world that have become basic facts within our general knowledge. We tend to take for granted that there were points in human history when humans did not know what we know today or knew it and interacted with it in a different way. We tend to take for granted our knowledge of the moon, its features, and its functions. Prior to the 16t

There is one shape that has shaped my art practice more than any other... the circle. I made the choice early on, to paint most of my first exhibition works on circular canvases, despite this being a very challenging shape to source from framers and art stores. For me, the circle is eternal. Expansive. It is not just a viewfinder to paint through, but a quantum phenomenon, a spiritual structure beyond our senses, a way of being, or something to do with existence itself. For m

Throughout my exhibition, I noticed a discomfort in viewers facing the wall of naked female bodies with the moon, my 'Phases collection'. There was a hesitation, as if they were not allowed to look, for fear of sexualising the figures. In an over-sexualised culture, we have been conditioned to see through the male gaze. The hesitation to look comes from shame. I tend to use female nakedness in my work, from my naked linear illustrations in my book 'Naked Notions' to my latest

To introduce this article, I want to tell you how I started out as a self-taught artist, just a girl following YouTube videos, buying cheap materials from $2 shops and practicing endlessly in the hope of improving. One of the first things I ever tried to paint in watercolour was macarons. They failed terribly. I cried and genuinely thought, at 18 years old, that my art career was already over because I was never going to be able to paint well. But with rigorous effort, and th

The privilege of being an artist is that you feel love so deeply from seeing the natural world around you that you can create from that place, and that you can remind people to stop chasing and start staring too. We humans chase so many things in this life. We chase security, love from others, relationships, power, money, maybe fame. We can chase and chase and chase. But the one thing we do not have to chase is ... beauty. Beauty is free it's just there, existing. It's in the

This weekend I had the privilege in my early career to receive two portraiture commissions, which has spurred a few reflections on portraiture. Why does portraiture now hold a unique legacy that can endure past an individual's expiry, that a selfie, an AI impression, and a mirror cannot carry? Now that I am a paid artist, how will this affect how I will paint the image? How will I juggle a sitter's expectation and their lifetime of self-image creation that may contradict my i

Sacred art needs to say something to this generation other than, “here are cherubs on clouds,” dreamy harpists, lifelike furry fruits, and people looking pious, virgin women in flowing robes with halos, God as an old man with a beard sitting in the sky. When people think about sacred art, they go straight to the Renaissance and Baroque periods, where it all began, Catholic art. No, Gen Z don’t want to see the unachievable ideal. Catholic saints are just as unhelpful as AI mod

This week I was surprised to see new, clear images of the Moon’s surface, explosions of rainbow colour, so similar to the way I have been painting it for over a year. It is funny how instinct and intuition can somehow hold truth before science confirms it. That is how I felt when I saw these images. As though I had always known the Moon was a quiet, wonderful beauty, something far beyond a spectrum of grey. VIEW The minerals in the Moon’s surface give it its colour. Blue tone

The world is always going to have a crisis, that is the point. In every part of history there has been a dilemma, a rupture, a moment of instability and yet the artist continues to create beauty. When the world is burning down, we keep on making. Even when resources are limited and pressures are at their worst, you still see art flowing from individuals and communities as activism, resistance, lamentation, prayer or even discovery. You see it in the Renaissance, in Florence,

I thought I would go a bit deeper into this idea of beauty, really drawing from the tradition of philosophy and theology. As mentioned, I’m an art history and curatorship student, and I’m just a lover of all things beautiful, I’m an artist and an author myself, so I’m dedicated to gifting beauty onto the world through art. This branch of philosophy, aesthetics, is explored by Dietrich von Hildebrand, who breaks this idea into two types of beauty, primitive beauty and the subl