""Calm Day" Floral textured painting" Painting

The studio is where the noise stops.

Before I enter, I am a mother of two daughters, a wife, a person carrying the weight of ordinary life - worries about the future, about family, about everything that waits outside the door.

But somewhere between stretching the linen - I only use pure linen or heavy cotton, fabrics so alive you want to run your hand across them before a single brushstroke - and mixing the first colours, something shifts. The thoughts don't stop all at once. They slow. Then slow further. And by the time the palette knife reaches the canvas and the first petal takes shape, they are simply gone.

I have been a student of Eckhart Tolle since 2017. His teaching didn't give me a philosophy. It gave me a practice. And that practice, I discovered, lives most naturally in paint.

My work lives in the space between control and its absence. I set the direction of a branch - that's the only real power I have over it. Where it lands, how far it travels, whether it lands at all: that's not mine to decide. I choose where the spray falls, not its size or density. I choose the colour, but the can doesn't always deliver what I imagined, and when it doesn't, I work with what actually appeared. Each flower built with the palette knife is not planned. It arrives. The colour was chosen earlier, yes - but the petal itself happens in the Now, in the small negotiation between my hand and everything I can't quite steer.

This is what I paint. Not flowers. Not gardens. Not decoration for beautiful rooms - though I hope they bring beauty too.

I paint the reminder that there is somewhere to return to.

If you feel something standing in front of one of these works a kind of stillness, an exhale you didn't know you were holding - then you already understand what they are made of.