Some people know from the beginning. She didn't — or rather, she talked herself out of it.
She's been drawing since she could hold a pencil. But when it came to choosing a path, she chose the sensible one: Architecture. And she loved it — the model-making, the obsessive detail, the hand-drawn plans at 1:100 scale where she'd render every single brick by hand. She graduated with awards for her drawings and the quiet confidence that this was her way in.
Then came 600 job applications. Five interviews. No offers.
In that in-between time, she picked up some gouache and painted her grandad's dining room as a birthday surprise — the room where they'd celebrate Christmas', family gatherings, and delicious dinners. He absolutely adored it.
Then she painted her own bedroom. Her bed, her pink pillows, her leopard print sheets — a room she'd outgrown but hadn't yet left. Not for a brief. Not for a grade. Just for herself. And something clicked back into place.
Architecture had given her everything except the thing she actually wanted: to create, freely, for a living. The discipline, the obsessive eye for detail, the ability to see a project through from first sketch to final mark — all of it came with her. What she left behind was the fear.
Her work is about the ordinary made extraordinary. Interior scenes, domestic spaces, the view from the top of stairs, the spines of her 40 records painted one by one. She paints the places people live in and love in — so they can see them, really see them, maybe for the first time.
If she never builds a building, and the only mark she leaves on the world is these paintings, she's happy.