Garden Heart — Where Beading, Botanicals and Energy Meet

There are paintings you plan and paintings that find you. Garden Heart was the second kind.

It began, like many of my paintings, with layers of color. The painting was intuitive, energetic, alive with the feeling of a summer garden in full light. Then a soft pink and lavender form emerged from the abstract field, glowing and dreamlike, sitting somewhere between a bloom and pure energy.

And then came the beads.

From my Melbourne garden to canvas — the yellow pansy inspires this intuitive abstract mixed media painting, Garden Heart.

The Meditative Practice of Beading

As an intuitive abstract mixed media artist I love including beads in many of my paintings. Each tiny glass bead is placed by hand, one at a time. It is slow, meditative work that mirrors the way energy moves — gathering at the centre, building outward, radiating into the world around it.

The beads in Garden Heart are not decoration. They are light made tangible. Pink and blue glass catching and holding the light differently at every hour of the day.

The Yellow Pansy

Below the beaded heart a yellow pansy emerges from the colour field — loose and expressive, painted from memory and feeling rather than observation. Pansies grow in my garden and have become a recurring presence in some of my abstract botanical paintings. Small, ordinary, overlooked — and yet full of quiet energy and colour.

This is the tension I am always exploring in my work — the seen and the unseen, the ordinary and the luminous, the garden and the energy field it lives within.

A Painting About Things Unseen

Garden Heart is a painting that places a botanical element at the heart of an abstract energy field. The beading marks the point of maximum energy, the place where the visible and invisible meet.

It is, at its heart, a painting about the things I love most. The joy of a summer garden. The meditative pleasure of hand-beading. The freedom of intuitive abstract colour. And the enduring belief that beauty and energy are the same thing, just seen from different angles. Some paintings are tended this one was made.