About The Artist

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I’m a self-taught hyperrealism artist based in British Columbia, Canada. My work moves through

wildlife, portraiture, and mythic beings, but what ties it together is presence — the need to

make something deeply felt feel almost alive.

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I did not come to art through a traditional path.​

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I have lived more than one life before becoming an artist.​

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For fifteen years, I worked in animal care, wildlife rehabilitation, veterinary assistance,

and animal cruelty investigation. It was meaningful work, but it was not gentle work.

It required patience, strength, grief, and the ability to keep showing up for vulnerable

lives in situations most people never see.

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Eventually, the emotional weight of that career became something I could no longer carry,

and I had to leave it behind.​ Then, at 37, I stepped into an entirely different world.

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With no background in welding, no knowledge of oil and gas, no money, no gear, and no one waiting to guide me, I left for Northern Alberta three days after hearing about a job. I started from the ground

up — working as a labourer, heavy equipment operator, and welder’s helper in one

of the harshest industries in Canada.

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The days were long. The weather was brutal. The work was physical, lonely, and unforgiving.

I was a woman entering a man’s world, in a man’s role, at an age when most people had

already spent nearly twenty years building that career.

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I had to learn fast. I had to grow thick skin.

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During my third year of slowly toiling through physically brutal jobs in the field, I enrolled with the CWB and became a QC/Weld Inspector. I studied through correspondence after working long days in the field,

studying at night, and challenging exams on my days off.

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Over time, I rose from the ground level into inspection and upper management. I know what it means to start in the trenches — literally — and build a life through discipline, endurance, and sheer refusal to quit.

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When I finally left oil and gas after a ten-year career, it was not because I had failed.

It was because I had found art.

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For the first time, I had found joy. And I knew it was time to choose the next chapter.

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The Turning Point

 

Art entered my life during COVID, at a time when I was trying to become the healthiest version of myself.​ After decades of using alcohol and smoking as crutches, I reached a point where I knew I could not

keep living the same way. I had survived, rebuilt, pushed through, and carried myself through more

than one life — but this time, something had to truly change.

 

So I quit drinking and smoking cold turkey.

The first months were brutal. I needed something to do with my hands, something to keep my mind

steady while my body and life recalibrated. I ordered paint-by-numbers from Amazon, just to

have something simple to focus on. I still have them.

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But very quickly, I wanted to know more. I wondered if I could actually learn how to paint, so I went to YouTube and began searching for tutorials.That moment changed everything.

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I started with dollar-store paints and cheap brushes, teaching myself one video, one mistake,

one experiment at a time. I still have those early supplies too.

They remind me how I started, where I came from. What it took to get here.

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Just as I had taught myself to become a weld inspector, I began teaching myself to draw and paint.

What started as a way to survive a difficult season became the doorway into the life

I had been trying to reach all along.

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Everything I know about discipline, endurance, observation, and precision comes with me into the studio.

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Years spent training my eyes to find the tiniest discontinuities in welds — using light to manipulate shadow, angle, and surface — gave me an uncanny ability to dissect images and see what others might miss.

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That discipline became part of my visual language. It is how I build images to feel so real, so emotionally present, that you almost believe you could reach out and feel them.

This is my discipline. This is my world.

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I have built my life the hard way — through survival, reinvention, and an unwillingness to give up on myself. That history lives in my work. So does my love for beauty, strength, and what refuses to be broken.

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The Work

 

I’m drawn to subjects that hold presence — whether that’s a human face, the power of an animal,

or something that seems to exist just beyond ordinary sight. I’m interested in what makes

a viewer stop, look closer, and feel that there is more happening beneath the surface.

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My work is emotional, detail-driven, and shaped by contrast: strength and vulnerability,

realism and mystery, beauty and survival. I don’t create simply to replicate an image.

I create to bring force, atmosphere, and truth into form.​

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The Natural History of Myth

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In my current body of work, The Natural History of Myth, I am reimagining ancient beings

not as fantasy illustrations, but as living presences that could belong to the natural world.

Dragons, sirens, gods, monsters, guardians and other mythic forms are

approached through realism, anatomy, instinct, and emotional truth.

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I have always been drawn to the possibility that reality is wider than what we can see.

This collection gives form to that lifelong question through anatomy, instinct, biology,

evolution, mystery, and force made tangible.

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What if myth was never fabricated — but evidence of something once known?

What moves at the threshold of the seen and the unseen, just beyond the limits of human sight?

And what happens when the impossible is painted with the force of reality?

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This is The Natural History of Myth.

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A body of work built on the possibility that ancient beings were never simply imagined, but remembered, feared, worshipped, witnessed, and misunderstood.

Through anatomy, instinct, emotion, texture, and presence, they are brought into the natural world as

living possibilities — beings that may have belonged to this world all along.