Garden Heart - Small Wonders Series

This painting reflects a moment in my garden at home — surrounded by flowers and the play of light on petals, that feeling of being held by colour and nature all at once.
Like so many of my paintings, Garden Heart is inspired by flowers and the natural world, together with an exploration of energy and things unseen. The beads at the centre are not decoration — they are light made tangible. Each one placed by hand, one at a time, in a slow meditative practice that mirrors the way energy moves — gathering at the centre, radiating outward, spilling into the world around it.
The yellow pansy below holds its own quiet energy — a small, beautiful and ordinary garden flower made luminous by the colour field it lives within. Some paintings are made. This one was tended.

Follow

I have been painting for twenty years — first quietly, as a private practice, and now with the intention of sharing that joy with others. I am a Melbourne-based abstract artist working in acrylic and mixed media, and my paintings are explorations of joy, colour, light and the hidden geometry I find everywhere in the natural world. I am obsessed with flowers, sky, botanical form, and the patterns that repeat across nature — from the spiral of a rose to the arc of a cloud.
Some of my works incorporate hand-stitched glass beading — each bead placed slowly by hand as a meditative practice, a way of processing feeling and finding stillness. These pieces hold two things at once: the vibrant energy of painted colour and the intimate quiet of careful craft. The beads catch the light. They are small moments of sparkle inside something larger.
My work currently spans three bodies of work:
Luminous Forms — paintings rooted in the feeling of the Victorian landscape. The light at Cape Bridgewater, the sky over country Victoria, the warmth of a Melbourne garden in summer. These are not literal records of place but emotional ones — painted in bold colour and luminous layered form. They are about what it feels like to be inside that light.
Small Wonders — my mixed media series combining bold acrylic painting with hand-stitched glass beading. Each bead is placed slowly by hand as a meditative practice. The subjects are the invisible things that make life feel magical — dreams, stardust, love, joy. The beading is not decoration. It is the point. Come close. The light changes everything.
Full Volume — small scale, spontaneous, maximalist paintings about pure colour and energy. No plan, no beading, no narrative. Just paint picked up and followed wherever it wanted to go. Bold, joyful and unapologetically more.
Every painting is one of a kind, made in my Melbourne studio. I paint for people who want to feel something when they walk into a room — joy, warmth, the particular aliveness of bold colour and honest making.