I create watercolour and gouache paintings that tell stories and capture moments from my daily life in New Brunswick. My subjects are the ones closest to me: my husband, our dogs, and the familiar roads and scenes around our home in Hanwell. I paint what I encounter in my regular routines, the view from the dog daycare route, the light hitting a building I pass every week, the way storm clouds gather over an ordinary road. Every painting records a specific moment I experienced firsthand: the light, the location, the season, and the mood, composed carefully and painted from my own photographic references.

I have been painting for most of my life. I started learning watercolour at eleven, with an artist neighbour, every Wednesday after school. I went on to formal training in a comprehensive high school visual arts program in Mississauga, Ontario, where I built strong foundations in studio work, art theory, and art history. After high school I took a long pause to pursue a career in healthcare, and I returned to painting seriously in 2019, when my husband and I relocated to New Brunswick to be closer to family and build a quieter life. I have kept a consistent studio practice ever since, while balancing full-time work and family.

My work has been shown in solo exhibitions including Love This Town (2023), Wish You Were Here (2025), and most recently Stay (2026), all featuring scenes of daily life with my dogs. My paintings have appeared in Created Here Magazine and on the cover of The Fiddlehead, and I have been commissioned by Elections NB and the UNB Alumni Association. I am an Elected Member of both the Society of Canadian Artists and the Federation of Canadian Artists.

Through my paintings I hope to help viewers recognize the beauty in their own daily journeys and the familiar places they might otherwise overlook.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what sparked your interest in the visual arts?

I have been making art for as long as I can remember. The spark I can point to most clearly came when I was eleven. An artist who lived nearby took me on as a student, and I spent every Wednesday after school learning watercolour with her. That early start led me into a high school visual arts program in Mississauga, where I trained in studio work alongside art history and theory. I stepped away from painting for many years to build a career in science and healthcare, but the pull never really left. When my husband and I moved to New Brunswick in 2019, I returned to it in earnest, and it has been a constant in my life since.

What drew you to watercolour painting, and why do you prefer working in this medium?

Watercolour was my first “serious” medium, the one I learned as a child, so there is a long familiarity there. What keeps me with it is how well it suits the kind of painting I do. So much of my work is about capturing a particular quality of light and a fleeting moment, and watercolour has a transparency and immediacy (and sometimes surprises!) that lend themselves to exactly that. I work in gouache alongside it, which gives me more opacity and control when a passage calls for it. Together, the two let me move between textures within the same painting.

What inspires or excites you in your work?

What excites me most is the storytelling. Over the last several years, my biggest motivation has shifted toward making paintings that tell personal stories, and that is what keeps inspiring me. I take photos as inspiration for paintings constantly. I am drawn to ordinary moments, the ones that are easy to walk past, and to the way the right light or weather can make a familiar scene worth preserving. When a painting captures not just a place but the feeling of being there, that is the part I find most rewarding.

Describe your creative process, from idea to finished work. Can you explain how a painting comes to life?

A painting almost always begins with a moment from my own life that I have photographed, often something I noticed in passing. I work from my own photographic references, and I spend real time on composition before I commit anything to paper, frequently looking to art history for ideas about how to arrange a scene. From there, I build the painting in watercolour and gouache on heavy watercolour paper, layering to develop the light and mood. Painting is a little bit magical. There is a beginning stage where you are full of hope, an often-ugly middle stage you need to power through, and then, if the conditions are right and you keep going, it all comes together. I cannot explain that last bit, but I know you have to keep going in order to get there.

Who are your biggest artistic influences?

Edward Hopper, Alex Colville, Ann Fullerton (my childhood neighbour watercolour teacher 😊), and too many contemporary artists to count.

How has your personal experience or upbringing influenced your work?

Almost everything in my work comes directly from my own life, so my experience shapes it completely. As Maritimers would say, I am from away. My husband and I relocated to New Brunswick from Ontario to be closer to his family and to build a quieter life, and many of my paintings are really about finding my place here as a come from away-er, in a place that is different from where I grew up. The daily rhythms of that life, driving the same roads, the dogs, the changing Maritime light, are the raw material for nearly everything I paint.

What subjects/themes do you find yourself consistently drawn to?

My dogs, first and foremost, and the everyday life I share with them and my husband. Beyond that, the landscapes and scenes around our home: the familiar roads, buildings, and skies of central New Brunswick. Underneath all of it, the themes that keep returning are time and memory, the passage of time, nostalgia, and the wish to hold on to ordinary moments before they are gone.

Can you describe a painting or series that you're particularly proud of, and why?

I am especially proud of Stay, my current solo exhibition. It brings together more than fifty paintings exploring daily life with my dogs, and the title carries a double meaning that sits at the heart of the show: Stay as the simple command we give a dog, and stay as the deeper human wish for those dogs and moments to remain. Pulling that many works together around a single idea, and seeing it resonate with people at the opening, has been one of the most satisfying things I have done.

What is your most important artist tool? Is there something you can't live without in your studio?

A round #6 watercolour brush and reality TV playing in the background.

What has been your biggest success and/or biggest mistake in your journey as an artist, and how did you grow or learn from that?

Art is such a journey that I do not really register any of it as a mistake. My biggest success has been the connection I have been able to make with other people through my art and my art teaching. It has been so wonderful to be part of building a community.

How has living and working in New Brunswick helped and/or inspired you on your journey?

New Brunswick is the reason I paint the way I do now. Moving here gave me both the subject matter and the time to find my creative voice. The quiet roads, the working landscape of power lines and farms, and the constantly changing Maritime skies have become central to my work. I am also convinced that the shadows are different here, more dramatic and more colourful 😊. Being from away, painting these places has also been my way of putting down roots and learning visually about this place I have chosen to call home.

How has your journey as an artist evolved over time? Were there key moments or experiences that shaped how you work and create today?

The biggest shift came when I realized I had something to say through my art. I returned to painting in 2019 and realized that what excited me was not landscape or technique for its own sake, but telling personal stories. That changed how I work entirely. The key moments since then have been the ones that gave the work a public life: my first solo show, Love This Town, in 2023, becoming an Elected Member of the Society of Canadian Artists and the Federation of Canadian Artists in 2024, and building toward larger, more ambitious exhibitions like Stay. Each one pushed me to take the work more seriously and to treat it as a sustained practice rather than something on the side. I paint or work on my art in some way nearly every day.

Describe what you are most proud of in your career.

More than any single painting, I am proud that I have built and sustained a serious studio practice while working full time and being present for my family. Returning to art after a long pause and turning it into a consistent, recognized body of work, with solo exhibitions, elected memberships, and paintings that have found their way onto other people's walls, is the thing that means the most to me. It is thrilling that others find a connection with my work and want to display it in their homes. It is humbling and wonderful.

What would your dream project look like?

Currently my dream project is a book that documents the Stay series, pairing my paintings with short essays about the moments behind them, so the work lives on as something people can hold and return to after the exhibition comes down. An imaginary stretch project? The City of Fredericton has a Poet Laureate. It would be really cool if there were an Artist Laureate position to apply to. That would be amazing.

What advice would you give to an emerging visual artist?

Paint from your own life. The work that connects with people is rarely the most technically impressive; it is the most honest. And be patient. I came back to serious painting after years away and built my practice in the margins of a full-time job and family life. You do not need perfect conditions to take your work seriously. You need to keep showing up.