When did you get started as an artist? 

I have always been drawn to a creative lifestyle but it wasn’t until 2012 when I made the challenging decision to sell professionally. It definitely was not an easy road and there was a 6-year gap where I left my drawing and painting skills behind but hey, life isn’t easy. The difficult moments are what make up our stories and make us who we are.   

What drew you to your art form?  

It may sound cliché for an artist but pain, trauma and joy simultaneously drove me back into the art world and to where I am now. I mentioned, there was a 6-year hiatus between 2006 (when I completed my fine arts schooling) and 2012. I got incredibly “stuck” like a lot of people do in life. Back in 2005/2006 while I was studying photography, I used bugs as my models. That is when I fell in love with multiple subject matters in nature. In early 2011, I wound up in the hospital after contracting a horrible gastrointestinal infection. The rest of the year was a write-off with multiple medical tests that lead to a dark depression. I went looking for something to bring joy back into my life, and I chose to go back to drawing and painting. I selected the very first bee photograph I ever took back in 2006 to paint and the rest is history. My art form was made because of these events and even though it was the darkest moment in my life, happiness came out of it.   

Do you feel like your work represents something about you? 

I believe my work represents many aspects of me. First of all, I advocate for this planet in many ways but my work focuses on pollinators which humans need to survive or else the food chain will suffer. Second, my works are colourful and I am a very colourful person either in physical features like clothing or my personality. Thirdly, there is a deep emotional attachment that I share with bees; to me, it is like bees “saved me.” 

How do you make your work? Do you have any special techniques or tricks? 

I am an artist of many forms and each medium I use has many different techniques. Garden Buzz is strictly paintings and my techniques have changed over the years. Inspiration for painting has always originated from my photographs; I use my time in nature to capture the subject’s beauty through a lens. From there, I take bits and pieces from the image and create a composition either of realistic pieces or made-up ideas. When I started this series of bee paintings, I would roughly sketch in the drawing with paint right onto the surface. Over time, I realized I ended up wasting paint to cover up markings or colours I did not enjoy. Now I do all my sketching and colour theory in a sketchbook, draw out my drawing on newsprint and transfer it via carbon paper onto the painting surface. Waste is an important topic with me on a personal level, so this way I can see the details I want to portray and not waste materials.   

People have always been fascinated with the level of detail I create in the realistic bees, especially the bee wings. It isn’t really a trick but the fuzz involves multiple layers and very tiny paintbrushes. The wings are the last detail I work on and I create the transparency with airbrush medium and paint. Airbrush medium allows me to work with acrylic paint in an extremely liquid thin form while keeping the binder in the paint together. Unlike water which will break up the paint binder. Using large amounts of water could cause the paint to flake off of the surface in the future.

Has your work changed over time? 

It definitely has which I believe is a good thing. Being an artist, we should be experimenting with different ways to create. If you look at my work from 2012 to now, there has been a major jump in style, details, techniques, mediums and ideas. The subject matter has stayed the same but eventually, I would like to branch out to portraying ALL pollinators, not just bees. 

If someone told me I would be using decorative papers and raised textures in my artwork, I would have laughed. I was closed-minded in what I wanted to use in the past. I had absolutely no idea I would end up saying “mixed media” for a piece but now, the joy of experimenting is a wonderful feeling.