The mood of a room can change how you feel...
Imagine walking into your bedroom at the end of a long day and feeling your shoulders soften.
Or stepping into a hallway filled with warmth and colour that instantly lifts your mood and welcomes you home.
Perhaps a quiet corner invites you to pause and breathe for a moment. A woodland path disappears through the trees towards distant light. A meadow sways gently in the summer breeze. A garden overflows with flowers and birdsong.
Colours stir emotions
The room itself has not changed.
Yet somehow the way you feel within it has.
We instinctively understand that our surroundings affect us.
A room flooded with natural light feels different from one that is dark and enclosed.
Soft greens, blues and natural tones often create a sense of calm and restoration, while vibrant colours can bring energy, confidence and vitality.
The quality of light changes our experience too. Morning sunlight spilling across a room creates a different atmosphere from the warm glow of evening.
The spaces we inhabit don't simply reflect our mood. Over time, they help shape it.
Art creates the heart of a room
Yet when it comes to creating our homes, artwork is often treated as an afterthought. Something decorative. Something that fills an empty wall.
Perhaps it deserves a little more consideration than that.
Because artwork has a unique ability to bring together colour, light, nature and emotion in a single experience.
One of the most interesting observations I've made over the years is that people often respond very differently to different bodies of my work.
Some are immediately drawn to my big flower paintings. They describe them as bold, sensual, uplifting, energetic and full of presence. They get an instant hit of emotion the minute they see them. Others find them too overtly sensual, a little too bold.
Encounter vs Immersion
Others are drawn towards meadows, gardens and woodland paths. They talk about feeling calmer, restored, grounded and able to lose themselves within the landscape. They want to sit with them and feel they are on a journey into its depths. Often emerging with a sense of having had their nerves and senses embraced in warmth.
Neither response is right or wrong.
They simply reflect different emotional experiences.
The distinction that keeps returning to me is this:
The flowers create an encounter.
The meadows create immersion.
The flowers ask something of the viewer. An instant hit of recognisable energy. Hello, here I am!
The meadows welcome you in. Come and spend some time with me. Get lost in my depths and let me soothe you.
The power of colour and meaning
One of my clients commissioned a large peony painting called Confidence shortly after emerging from a traumatic divorce.
She had moved into a beautiful new home, but despite its size and elegance it felt devoid of character. More importantly, she felt she had lost part of herself.
The painting was created around the symbolism of the peony and the vibrant intensity of cerise pink. When it was installed, she told me it transformed not only the atmosphere of the house but how she felt within it. It became a daily reminder of optimism, possibility and a new chapter in her life.
It wasn't just because it was bright and energetic, there was more to it than that.
I researched colour and flower meanings from cultures across the world. The symbolism they held. the bright pink peony was all about feminine strength, confidence and bold steps to new things.
And that's exactly the energy it imbued into the room. In fact the story was so evocative that we framed the sketches & research notes & they hang on another wall.
Changing moods in different light
In my own home, a large 120cm woodland painting hangs in my Mother's bedroom.
Almost every morning she tells me she has been for a wander through the woods before even getting out of bed. The painting draws her into the landscape and changes throughout the day as the light moves across it.
She loves the way it makes her feel as if she going for a walk along the path and wanting to get to the pool of light beyond the trees. although she cannot go of to these places in reality anymore, the painting gives a sense of freedom. She feels calm, at peace, like she always used to wandering through the woods.
More than decor, a lived experience
Neither painting simply decorates a wall.
Each creates an experience.
The more I reflect on this, the more I realise that the homes people respond to most warmly are rarely the most glamorous or extravagantly designed.
They are the homes that tell a story. Full of memories gathered over time.
A treasured photograph. A favourite chair beside a window.A vase collected on holiday. A painting that evokes a memory or a feeling.
Objects gathered not because they match perfectly, but because they mean something.
When people visit my own home, which is also my gallery & studio, they often describe it as a sanctuary. It's not just about the art on the walls. They love exploring & looking at all the eclectic collections of objects , which cover every surface & corner. Contorted pieces of driftwood, crystals & fossils, glass paperweights & beach pebbles, each with its own special memory attached & remembered.
The secret isn't complicated.
It has simply been filled over time with things I love, things that hold memories and things that make me feel good.
The atmosphere grew from there.
Can a painting style tell transmit the mood of the artist?
The idea that art can evoke deep emotions is long known, as is the idea that artists paint how they feel.
This idea became even more apparent during a very strange experience I had, over a week spent painting live at the Van Gogh Immersive Experience. I was asked to come and paint as part of the exhibit with huge numbers of people passing through.
As a rule, I'd never copied another artists work, so this was all very new to me.
Immersing myself in Van Gogh's colours, brushwork and expressive energy as part of my research, altered my own emotional state. I discovered that I needed to use brushes I had never tried before and paint with strong, rapid movements to achieve an effect similar to Vincents.
For the first two days I simply thought I was feeling a bit 'off' because I was tired. By the third day felt a distinct sense of anxiety. By the end of the week i was a complete mess, stressed, shaky, anxious.
What on earth was going on?
Well, what it felt like to me was that by painting in Vincents style, I was experiencing his state of mind. Which we know was complicated and disturbed. To paint these brushstrokes meant I was creating in a more frantic way and ended up feeling very much as he did.
I've always believed that the emotional experience an artists lives through while painting, somehow becomes part of what viewers later experience. For me, I paint what I need rather than what I feel and the painting process gifts me with energy, calm, contemplation. People often comment how they feel looking at the paintings and it's uncanny how frequently it's exactly the same as my own experience.
How does this transfer of feelings happen? I don't know the answer.
But I do know that people respond to art in ways that go far beyond aesthetics.
Interior decor or an emotion captured?
Perhaps that is why the first question I ask clients is never:
"What colours would you like?"
Instead I ask:
"How do you want to feel in this space?"
Because once we know the answer to that question, the art becomes about far more than filling a wall. It becomes part of the experience of living within the room itself.
In a world that often feels busy, noisy and demanding, our homes have become more important than ever. They are the places where we rest, gather, heal, dream and reconnect with ourselves.
Perhaps creating a sanctuary isn't about perfection. Perhaps it's simply about surrounding ourselves with beauty, light, nature, memories and things that nourish us. One thoughtful choice at a time.
And perhaps that begins with a simple question:
How do you want to feel in this space?
