I paint to celebrate pure visual beauty and things which connect us and bring us joy.

My practice has evolved through three traditional genres- portraiture, landscape and still life.  A recent, natural progression has been for them to converge. I now work in connected trios: three paintings centred on a single person compromising of a portrait, a landscape of a place they love, and a still life using cherished objects- person, place, thing. Together they tell a quiet story of belonging.

The concept bloomed from my still lifes. Throughout my childhood, I watched family members preserve inherited belongings, often things of no monetary value, and I began incorporating them into my paintings. Working with clients, I wanted their paintings to feel deeply personal to them and I became captivated by the idea that heritage ripples fluidly through generations, like a stone skimmed across still water. Whether I am painting a patterned tablecloth used for family meals, an object that carries an ancestral story, or a face bearing the eyes of those who came before, I want to honour the familiar things that tether us to one another. This draws on the symbolic traditions of the Northern Renaissance Masters, but I deliberately subvert the triptych’s solemn register, treating heritage as something living and joyful. 

This work took on new urgency when I became an immigrant myself, leaving the UK for Michigan with my husband and daughter. My husband had already crossed from France to the UK; our daughter is growing up with three cultures flowing through her at once. Crossing a border sharpens your understanding of what you carried- why a person, a landscape, and a cherished object belong together. I believe this is not only an immigrant’s experience. It belongs to anyone who has ever looked at their facial features or held a treasured household object and wondered: where did these come from and what has come to me through them?

In oil, I work with a broken-brushwork technique. Rather than blending smoothly, I let individual directional marks brush right against one another. The convergence creates a vibrant, shimmering energy, building upon Pierre Bonnard’s use of optical colour vibration. A bright underpainting breathes through the surface, making each painting alive with moving light. This connects my work with painters such as contemporary Hilary Pecis, who elevates ordinary domestic spaces into affectionate, highly saturated records of human presence. My goal, always, is to open a communication between the subject and viewer- one that brings joy and peaceful reflection as we recognise what we share.