Shelley Bailey creates joyous, highly textured paintings using a technique entirely her own — layers of paint piped directly onto the canvas, the way a baker frosts a cake.
As her family's celebrated baker, Shelley had always been the one to pull out the piping bag for a birthday cake. One day she pointed it at a canvas. The result — acrylic piped into sculptural, blooming flower forms — became the foundation of her Sweet Deception collection. There is nothing else like it on this platform.
Her art begins where her life always has: with the quiet, deliberate choice to be a breath of fresh air for the people around her. That instinct to nurture has shaped every role she has ever stepped into — disability support, driver examiner, phlebotomist. Her favourite moment, in any room, is the one where someone breathes relief. She paints that moment.
Raised in the Hunter Valley and painting from a home studio alongside her daughter, Shelley has found deep healing in giving her daughter the childhood every child deserves — learning, in doing so, to nurture without condition. That same energy lives in her work. It is playful, free, and full of joyous movement. She is drawn to subjects that already carry the feeling she wants to give you — the softness of a flower, the openness of the coast — so that the emotion is built in before the brush even touches the canvas.
Shelley came to acrylics after a lifetime of watercolour, oils, and a childhood of illustrating her own storybooks. The discovery changed everything. Acrylic gave her the sculptural height of impasto and the soft, drifting quality of watercolour in one extraordinary medium.
When her work lives in your home, you'll feel its texture and its warmth. You might catch the scent of a summer garden, or find yourself lost in a bloom made of buttercream. And that comforting joy you feel? It was put there on purpose.
Shelley Bailey is currently accepting commissions for custom 'Sweet Deception' pieces. Click 'Ask about a Commission' to discuss your vision.