The Accidental Artist: How a Lifetime of Wandering Led Me to Paint

There's a moment and most artists will know it where you pick up a brush not because you're supposed to, but because you simply have no choice.

For me, that moment came in 2019, tucked between a set of shelves in my fair trade shop on the beautiful mid-north coast of New South Wales. I'd spent years filling those shelves with treasures from across the globe handwoven textiles from Marrakech, ceramics from Vietnamese markets, hand-stamped fabrics from artisans I'd met in the dusty lanes of Bangkok. I had always been drawn to things made by hand. Things that carried a story in every stitch, every brushstroke, every imperfect edge.

But somewhere along the way, I began to wonder if I had a story of my own to tell.

From Shopkeeper to Painter

My background was never in fine art. I was a traveller, a collector, a buyer who trusted her gut. I'd haggle over a bolt of indigo cloth in a Moroccan medina with the same instinct I'd later use to mix a perfect teal on the palette. The eye for colour, it turns out, doesn't care where it learned its craft.

I placed a few small original paintings in my shop, almost as an afterthought. Bright, bold little things acrylic on canvas, full of the shapes and memories that never really left me after years of wandering. A market stall in Havana. A doorway in Essaouira. The glint of light on the Aegean.

My customers stopped in front of them. And then they bought them.

That surprised me more than anything.

When the World Stopped, I Started

When we sold our business in 2020 and the world went very, very quiet, I did what felt most natural. I picked up my paints and disappeared into them.

Covid gave me time I hadn't expected and I used every hour of it to experiment. I tried card ranges. I moved onto prints. I played with digital art, layering pattern over pattern, letting colour do the loud, joyful talking I was missing from the world outside my window. And in 2022, I launched a range of handmade wall tiles at Life in Style one of Australia's most celebrated design trade events.

Standing there surrounded by buyers, designers and artists, I felt something I hadn't felt since my first solo trip abroad at twenty-something: that electric, terrifying, wonderful feeling of being exactly where you're supposed to be.

What My Art Is Really About

People sometimes ask me what style I paint in. Honestly, I don't know that I have a name for it. My work is intuitive. Self-taught. Built from sensory memory more than technical training.

When I sit down to paint, I'm not thinking about composition rules. I'm thinking about the smell of jasmine in a Moroccan riad at dusk. The noise of a tuk-tuk weaving through a Bangkok intersection. The impossible blue of the Caribbean sea when the sun hits it just right. The taste of mango and sticky rice eaten cross-legged on a bamboo mat.

My colour palette is bright, bold and deliberately joyful because joy is what travel gave me, and joy is what I want to give back.

Handmade, Always

Every piece that leaves my studio whether it's an art print, a wall tile, a throw or a tee is made with the same philosophy I carried into every market and artisan workshop I ever visited: handmade things matter. They hold energy. They hold intention. They hold the person who made them.

I believe your home should feel like a place you've travelled to layered, colourful, personal, alive.

That's what I make. That's what I hope lands on your walls.

If you're new here welcome. Pull up a chair, pour something good, and let me take you somewhere beautiful.