Klimt Re-imagined, 2024
Colour pencil on paper

This is the only coloured pencil drawing I have ever completed. The medium demanded patience and precision very different from my usual approach in watercolour and oil. Working in coloured pencil slowed me down, requiring careful layering and subtle tonal shifts. The process felt intimate and meditative, echoing the quiet emotional intensity that the rose itself represents. Below is a video showing the large-scale watercolour rose tree I created for a group exhibition in 2023. The work carries layered symbolic meanings, reflecting themes of love, endurance, growth, and emotional complexity. It took over seven months to complete — a process that required sustained attention, patience, and deep emotional investment. There are many conceptual threads within this large work, Sub Rosa, that I intend to continue and expand in future pieces.

I’ve just finished two newest works from the series, marking the beginning of my 2026 chapter. My artist language is shifting from romanticism towards something more mysterious, symbolic, darker and almost ritualistic, yet still beautiful. These two paintings are inspired by my ongoing reflections on life and death, mortality and immortality, sacrifice and ritual.

The title Touching You Through The Bones comes from an album I listened to constantly during my university years — a collection of western alternative music that felt both sad and beautiful. Those songs stayed with me for years, quietly shaping how I think about love, memory and loss. In this piece, I want to visualise my ideas where fragility and strength, life and death, and decay and renewal unfold like a dream. I can’t wait to build the next dream.

Lovers and Roses: A New Chapter

Lovers and Roses series