I didn’t start painting to become an artist.
I wasn’t trying to launch a career, or make something beautiful.
I was trying to breathe.
I was in the thick of early motherhood — exhausted, stretched thin, invisible in the way only mothers can understand. One day I said to my husband, “Sometimes motherhood feels like I'm getting covered in webs.”
Like I’d been put on a shelf and forgotten. Fading at the edges.
And then I thought I need an outlet to expend this feeling:
Maybe I should paint it.
I didn’t have a plan. I had a brush.
I sketched something. It felt good. Not “art world good” — just honest. Then I showed it to my family, who were visiting. They said it looked like something. My husband said I should keep going.
So I did.
Not out of ambition — out of something deeper.
Out of the need to make space for myself again.
I painted another. And another. Each one was a moment I’d been carrying. I didn’t even realize how full I was — until the paint gave it somewhere to land.
I didn’t set out to paint “motherhood.”
That’s not how it started.
I just painted what I felt — the weight, the stillness, the silent beauty, the sharp edges.
But as the paintings came out of me, I saw the thread.
They were all about becoming. Losing who I was. Meeting who I might be. All of it held quietly in the texture and colour and pause of oil on canvas.
I didn’t expect it to turn into a path.
But it did.
People started responding. Quietly. Deeply.
And I started wondering — maybe this isn’t just for me.
Maybe this is how I support my family.
Maybe this is how I stay close to my child without losing myself.
Maybe this is my way forward.
I didn’t mean to become an artist. But I am one now.’
Not because I trained in it. Not because I set out to.
But because one honest moment turned into a brushstroke.
And that brushstroke turned into a body of work.
And that body of work turned into a voice I didn’t know I’d been silencing.
I still paint the same way I did in the beginning —
Not to impress. Not to escape.
But to say something real.