The Meadow Art Studio

There’s nothing quite like preparing for a solo show.

It’s a bit like inviting everyone to read your diary—if your diary were six feet wide, layered with colour and texture, and hung under gallery lights for all to see. Each brushstroke holds a secret. Each canvas, a confession.

For Beneath the Painted Sky, I returned to large-scale canvases—the kind that require you to use your whole body when painting. It’s a style I actually prefer. Bigger surfaces let me breathe. They let the ideas flow more wildly and freely. They let the sea take up the space it deserves.

But for years, I painted small rather nonchalant pieces for passing tourists, easy for them to tuck into a suitcase and carry home. There’s joy in that too, of course. But there’s also limitation. The large canvases called me back like a tide—and I answered.

Somewhere in between, I noticed my medium-sized paintings shifting, too. The sea became looser, more abstract and fluid, while the details on the shore—the little beach chairs, umbrellas, and tide-washed toys—grew sharper and more intricate. It takes me far longer to paint the fine details of a weathered picnic table than the entire ocean beside it. But I love the contrast. The vast and the precise. The dream and the detail.

Preparing for a show like this has taken over my life in the best possible way. My days have revolved around the studio—early mornings, late nights, a blur of paint-stained clothes and half-drunk cups of tea. It’s romantic from the outside, maybe, but it’s also hard work. You have to be wildly creative and ruthlessly disciplined at the same time.

Every hour counts. Every painting carries a piece of me. The artist anxiety – will I be ready? Hovering between I will never have all of this done to I have loads of time, to I have so much still to do!!

And when the doors open and the lights go up, you can only hope it’ll be worth every moment.