Studio
This is where the paintings come from.
It started with a photograph I took on a trip back to Albania — just the water, nothing else. The colour was wrong in the photo, too saturated, too postcard. But what I remembered was different. I remembered the weight of the water, the way it held light underneath.
I came back to the studio and started painting from that memory instead. Not the place, but the feeling of the place. That first painting sat on the wall for two weeks before I understood what it was.
The sea has always been in my work, underneath everything. This series is just the first time I let it come to the surface.
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April 2026
What I learned painting the same flower twenty times
People ask why I paint flowers when there are already so many flower paintings in the world. But that is exactly the point. The flower has been painted a thousand times, and still no one has painted the one I se
Each time I return to the same bloom — a peony, usually — I find something I missed. A colour at the edge of a petal that only appears in late afternoon light. The way the stem holds weight.
Painting the same thing twenty times is not repetition. It is listening more carefully each time.
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March 2026
Albania — the garden I paint from memory
My grandmother’s garden in Tirana was not large, but it was full. Roses, jasmine, herbs that smelled sharp in the heat. She tended it every morning, and I would sit on the step and watch.
I did not know then that I was learning to see. The way colour changes in different light. The way a garden is never still, even when nothing moves.
I have not been back to that garden in years. But it is the garden I paint from. Every floral I make is some version of that place — not as it was, but as I carry it.
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February 2026
How I mix the colour of Mediterranean water
Everyone asks about the blues. The particular teal-green that shows up in the seascape series — it does not come from a tube. It is a mix I developed over years of trying to get the colour right.
It starts with a base of phthalo blue, then a touch of viridian, then the thing that makes it work: a small amount of Naples yellow. That warm undertone is what turns cold blue water into something that feels alive.
Mediterranean water is not blue. It is blue with warmth underneath — the sand, the sun, the memory of heat. That is what I am mixing for.
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