What Goes Into a Painting That Nobody Sees
Someone asked me recently what actually goes into one of my paintings. I started answering the way you'd expect — paint, boards, paper, brushes — and then stopped, because that's not really it.
The honest answer is time. Twenty-eight years of it.
Where it started
I picked up a brush again when our youngest son was two. I was at home with him and needed something that was mine, and being a creative person, painting was the obvious thing. That was the beginning of what became this business, though I had no idea at the time.
Along the way I studied print and textile design at TAFE, which is where the fabric side of my work comes from. I've done business courses, masterminds, mindset work, and read more books from mentors than I can count, taking a small gem from each.
The degree I never did
Here's the thing people find surprising: I'm a self-taught artist. I never went to art school or did a fine arts degree.
That was deliberate. I didn't want to be trained to paint like someone else. I admire a lot of artists, and I've watched plenty of them work, but their work is theirs. I wanted mine to stay authentically mine — so I followed my own instincts, worked out my own processes and techniques, and let the style develop from what I loved rather than what I was taught. The way I use colour, the shapes and marks, the little bits of detail, the way I push a flower to somewhere between realistic and abstract so it shows you something you wouldn't have noticed in the garden — all of that came from painting, not from a classroom.
That took years to settle into. Years of experimenting with mediums, learning what works with the way I paint and what doesn't, making mistakes, and slowly building the confidence to work on instinct rather than by rule. You can't buy that confidence. You can only earn it one painting at a time.
The things you'd expect
And yes, there is all the physical stuff. I'm a bit of a hoarder of paints, brushes, papers and boards, because I never quite know what I'll want to work on next. At the moment it's large sheets of paper. Before that it was cradled wooden panels, and before that, canvas. Acrylics mostly, with gouache, watercolour, Posca pens and collage when the painting asks for them.
There are subscriptions and software and studio costs, the way there are in any small business. But if I'm honest, they're the least interesting part of the answer.
What you're actually buying
When you buy an original painting, or a print of one, you're not buying paper and pigment. You're buying a way of seeing flowers that took nearly three decades to arrive at, and that exists nowhere else. Every piece is hand-painted by me — self-taught, never AI, never borrowed from anyone else's style.
Showing that work to the world is still the scariest part. It's very personal, putting something you made with your own hands in front of people. But that's also why it's worth something.
If you'd like to see what all those years look like on paper, the current originals and prints are in the shop.
