I am an emerging transcendental artist who specialises in surrealist oil paintings and I have spent the last few years studying and practising art as a painter, illustrator, and poet, in Florence, Italy.
For the first four years of my life, I grew up in the countryside of Wilshire, so my earliest memories are of climbing trees and making dens in bushes, in communion with nature. I felt held and whole in the little Eden of Pewsey Vale and longed for nothing but the dirt in my hands or the chaos of creating with crayons.
As I child I always had an affinity towards magic, I role-played as a witch in my “potion corner”, collected miniature fairies and mystical creatures and believed wholeheartedly in the power of my wishes. An affinity I must admit that was crushed in my teenage years, but has remerged in adulthood. At four my family relocated to Cologne, Germany where I went to my first art museum; The Ludwig.
I remember standing in front of a huge painting with bright light and a man falling from the sky, and it was the first time a piece of artwork made an impression on me. I recently tracked down the artwork and found that it was La Gare de Perpignan by Dali. I was struck by the significance of this, as I now consider myself to be a surrealist but I had no conscious knowledge of this connection.
I’ve been drawing my whole life. I used to continually strive after the skill level of my older sister and we spent many hours creating side by side. My art time was a form of escapism, a lifeline of calm amidst an unstable home life. It was this instability and collective pain in my family which inspired me to research psychology, self-help and healing methods while I was in my late teens.
When COVID hit, I read The Power of Now and started practising walking meditations and mindfulness. This gave me a new understanding of the nature of suffering and a compassionate lens through which to view the world, though there was and still is a lot to face within myself. So I began to read into Jungian psychology and internal Family Systems Therapy and started practicing EFT tapping.
I had fallen out of love with my creative practice at school as my artworks had lost their authenticity and were produced to please a board of examiners rather than myself.
However, I still went to study Art, Design and Media practice at Kingston School of Art, where I explored the archetype of the ‘wild woman’ and the concept of surrender through sculptural fashion garments, which reignited my creative spark.
At this time I started reading more spiritual literature, from Be Here Now by Ram Dass to the Tao Te Ching and using tarot cards as a method for self-reflection. It was in the research of my fashion projects that I started to produce energetic paintings, as illustrations of the experience of dissolving the ‘pain body’ or ‘psychic residue’ through conscious awareness.
Through this, I reawakened my desire to paint and longed to develop my skill as an artist, but I had applied for fashion design degrees and in my state of confusion I turned to my tarot deck. The answer came in the three of wands, guiding me to look for opportunities abroad, in turn inspiring my move to Florence to pursue traditional training in master oil painting techniques at Charles Cecil Studio.
Alongside my portrait studies, I began to practice Bhakti Yoga and most significantly mantra meditation, a method which I found completely transformative. I started spending time at Villa Vrindavana, an ISKON temple in the hills of Tuscany, with an impressive sacred art museum, and I knew then that my path was not a portrait painter but a sacred artist, so I left Charles Cecil to experiment with my painting practice.
Now the impact of classical training combines with dynamic expressionism in my surrealist oil paintings as I constantly play with the balance between controlled and intuitive mark-making, of maintaining and dissolving form, to explore the tension of duality.
I use my canvas as an energetic mirror to the process of transmutation through returning to a state of oneness. That is why I like to work on a life-sized scale, so the viewer can relate to the image as a reflection of their self. I recognise my practice as a form of Alchemy, hoping to both express and invoke transmutation through my flowing brushstrokes, a technique I developed to imitate water's meditative qualities.
My paintings are informed by an array of spiritual practices and esoteric sources, from fire purification ceremonies and Bhakti yoga to Sufi poetry and Alchemical tarot decks. My practice involves a process of clarifying my personal experiences through poetry, experimenting with collage and preliminary sketches, and materialising these ideas through paint. In July of 2023, I completed a solo art exhibition in Florence at Il Conventino, showcasing a collection of my figurative oil paintings through which I aimed to create an energetic mirror to the experience of returning to a state of oneness.
I was part of an artist collective in Florence and in September 2023 we hosted a multidisciplinary event at the art residency hotel Numeroventi where I painted Deciduous Live, a painting which explored how karmic attachments naturally fall away during the process of spiritual evolution.
In January, I exposed two life-sized energetic mirrors as part of a group exhibition titled Wundakammer, held at Aquaflor Firenze and curated by artist Polina Stepanova. This pair of paintings investigates the greatest challenge for the Alchemist: the amalgamation of Fire and Water, reaching a state of unity through the assimilation of equal and opposite elements.
Inspired by the Etruscan Lunar Goddesses, Catha, the ruler of the tides, finds her greatest strength in harmony with her consort Suri, who reigns over mighty volcanoes, the sun, and fire. I also collaborated with crochet artist Nisha Kapitzki on Stream of Yarn, a capsule collection blending art with fashion, inspired by my painting collection titled When The Stream Walks On The Shore.
From February to April of 2024, I worked in my studio in Wiltshire and experienced disenchantment with my painting practice for the first time, so I took a break from painting in May and June when I returned to Florence. I was reading and writing a lot of poetry, visiting art museums and churches around Italy, sketching from life to maintain my observational skills, and making sense of it all by curating my creations into a digital journal on Instagram.
I saw the value of a break from my painting practice, shifting to other creative outlets and absorbing inspiration to replenish my creativity well. In hindsight, I can attribute this disconnection to the lack of a creative community and a general burnout. I now truly recognise how important feedback from people experiencing my work first-hand is, especially due to the scale of my paintings.
In May, over 50 of my illustrations were featured in an exhibition of 60 collectable art books produced by a large community of artists titled At The Kitchen Table held at Spazio Sasseti in Florence. I also had the joy of collaborating on and featuring in the first edition of Cura Cura magazine whose mission is to provide an approachable path to healing through the transformative power of art.
In June, I hosted a final exhibition of my painting collection in Florence as well as a sketch sale to raise money for aid in Gaza. Having an audience who responded to and genuinely connected with my pieces reaffirmed their value in a wider context, and I have returned to Wiltshire full of painting ideas.
I have always remained a diligent and enthusiastic scholar. Inspired by the intersection of Spiritual Literature, Science, and Eastern Mysticism, my desire to further my understanding of the divine has driven both my creative and academic pursuits, which inform and sustain one another.
I am very grateful to have been offered a place to study Theology and Religion at Oxford University in October, where I plan to specialise in Buddhism and Hinduism and learn Sanskrit. Ultimately, my goal is to unite my spiritually guided creative practice, with a strong foundation of theological knowledge, and to use that wisdom to engage in journalism and social activism, while inspiring the contemplation of the divine through my artwork.
