Series One  |  peach, gin, fizz

Created in April, 2018

‘peach, gin, fizz’ is a very special painting to me. Most of you know from watching my process that I can often end up in a place I didn’t know I was looking to be. This painting was the first time I experienced one of those amazing surprise results where I’ve painted something that I needed without knowing at the time that I needed it at all. You’d really, really laugh if you knew my intended outcome when I sat down on my bedroom carpet to paint this in 2018. Fortunately, in the face of one failure I found a success I had been hoping for since I left school, an aesthetic that I believed in and that filled me up. 

In the years leading up to ‘peach, gin, fizz’ I had painted a lot both for enjoyment and for work. I quietly knew I wanted to be a painter but I also knew that deciding on something like an aesthetic, or an identifiable painting style, or a colour palette, or most importantly a subject was going to cripple me. I love working on abstract paintings for homes and for commercial projects and am lucky to have been able to adapt and experiment with different client briefs. However, I found that I was craving something that felt more authentic to me rather than just fitting a brief. 

Note: Favourite client brief “I just want art, that when people walk in, they say, “wow, that’s art!” 

When I leaned into this artistic direction, I couldn’t believe how obvious it was. A subconscious intrigue into the feminine condition and the intricacies of the female experience, eventually ended up in a subject that was developed in the pursuit of understanding the complex ways that women connect, associate and disassociate with one another. I’ve always been inspired by the ways women communicate and am bemused by the underlying rivalry that often permeates female relationships; where hostility and control triumphs over empathy and kindness. I’m both intrigued and unsettled by the ways young women pull themselves apart only to compare their strengths and weaknesses to the other women around them.

Ever since its creation, ‘peach, gin, fizz’ has hung in my home and reminded in times of disconnect, about the vibrant strength of empathy and kindness among our sisters.

I hope my paintings have inspired a reclamation of sisterhood and self, unencumbered by societal pressures or expectations and will continue to do so x 

Shop fine art prints of peach, gin, fizz here.