From the studio

Welcome. I'm so glad you're here.

This is my Studio — my little corner of the internet where the paintings live, and now, where the stories behind them will live too. I've wanted a space like this for a while: somewhere to talk about the work in a way that a gallery wall or a product photo never quite lets you.

So, what will you find in the Journal? Mostly, the in-between moments. The process behind how a piece actually comes together — the layers, the mess, the decisions made at 11pm that change everything. The stories that don't fit neatly into a collection description, like where an idea came from, or why a particular whale ended up somewhere it has no business being. Sometimes it'll just be studio updates — what's on the easel, what's finished, what's headed out the door to someone new.

I paint in layers — oils, acrylics, collage, gold leaf, texture built up slowly over weeks. There's poetry pressed into the canvas that no one will ever read, fingerprints that will outlast me, small hidden symbols tucked into corners for anyone patient enough to look. I think the work deserves a bit of unpacking, and I think you might enjoy the unpacking as much as the finished piece.

I come to this from an unusual place — twenty years in medicine before painting became the whole of it, not just the evenings and weekends. That shapes everything I make, and I imagine it'll shape a lot of what I write here too.

If you'd like to follow along, the best way is to join the Studio Circle below — new work, new stories, and the occasional look behind the curtain, straight to your inbox. No spam, just art and a little bit of wonder.

Thank you for being here at the start of this. I hope you find something in it.

— Tricia

Every painting begins in layers — not just of paint, but of meaning. First comes the acrylic, the inks, the spray paint: energy and colour poured onto the canvas without overthinking. Then collage — pieces of my own poetry, words that feel right, fragments pressed into the surface where they'll be hidden forever.

Nobody sees this stage. By the time a painting is finished, hanging on someone's wall or arriving carefully wrapped at their door, this first layer is buried under everything that comes after — but it's still there, holding the piece together from underneath. I think of it as the bones.

Once the base is down, I start building texture. Modelling paste, sometimes clay, worked into the surface in thick passes — ridges and valleys that catch the light differently depending on where you're standing. Stencils go down next, patterns pressed through the texture, adding a rhythm the paint alone can't give you.

Then oils, laid over everything. This is the stage I love most — oil makes it juicy. It sits differently to acrylic, wetter, slower to dry, more forgiving of a change of mind. I can work back into it for days, softening an edge, deepening a shadow, finding the exact colour that wasn't there yet.

Gold leaf comes last, or close to it — small accents, never the whole surface. It gives the piece a vintage quality, almost steampunk, like it's been unearthed rather than painted.

And somewhere in all of this, usually without planning it, my fingerprints end up in the piece. Literally — pressed into wet paint or modelling paste, a print that will outlast me. I like that. It means no two paintings, however similar the subject, could ever be exactly copied. The texture is mine, down to the whorls on my fingers.

I also hide things. Small symbols worked into the layers where most people will never notice them — a tiny acorn tucked into a tree's roots, a bee resting somewhere it has no business being, a butterfly or a dragonfly caught mid-flight in a corner of the canvas. I don't tell people where to look. I like the idea of someone living with a painting for years and one day noticing something new in it — a secret nugget, hidden in plain sight, waiting for the right light or the right afternoon.

That's the part of this process people don't see when they look at a finished piece — how much of it isn't visible at all. The poetry buried in the first layer. The fingerprints under the oil. The bee nobody's found yet. A painting isn't just what ends up on top. It's everything underneath it too.