A PETAL A DAY

My art is a celebration of nature. I’m very interested in how looking at a flower or a leaf or a sunset can bring people joy in different ways, and how nature and art cross paths constantly. When looking at a flower petal you can see the brushstrokes of colour, and this is something I am always trying to capture in my work. My camera roll is absolutely filled with photos of colourful flowers, I simply cannot walk past a rose without taking photos of it from at least three different angles - I find it so magical how beautiful flowers are, and this is why I paint.

Always in an attempt to immortalise that feeling of magic that a flower gives me, and transfer this feeling to someone else as they’re looking at the imprint of the flower I saw, in a painting. Every brush stroke in a painting has a story behind it, it freezes a moment in time - when I look at my paintings I can feel remnants of what I was feeling the moment that I painted it, and this is forever instilled in time.

What interests me is how this moment will make other people feel. A lot of my paintings have different layers in them, some paintings in particular were created over the course of a number of months, and each different layer tells the story of my outlook at the time - often a layer is mostly covered with just a hint of it peaking through.

When I paint I generally don’t have a plan, and if I do, it dissolves quickly. It’s like I switch off the part of my brain that overthinks or structures things, and I allow a different part of myself to thrive, a part that flows with the paint making choices that I would not have consciously thought of, letting my mind roam free on the canvas. I would say my style of art is most influenced by Impressionism. Showing the brushstrokes and the movement of the painting is something that I love to do.

My current style of art was finessed during lockdown, I have always painted but I suddenly found myself with a whole lot more time! Something that I realised was that I was painting based on what I thought other people would want to see, it was when I started painting what I want to see that my style truly emerged.

The artists I am most influenced by are Feliks Kaparchuk because of the wonderment that his art evokes, Zazac Namoo who I have loved since highschool because of his magical surrealism, Kris Ancog who paints ethereal dreamscapes, and Silver Francis who paints the most incredible flowers, highlighting the brushstrokes in a way that I always aspire to do.