Painting is my practice...
When I create, I feel peaceful.
This is how I know I’m in the right place. I live with and embrace my AuDHD. It gives me a deep love for connection, especially the cosmic kind, the kind that feels bigger than names and roles. And yet, just as powerfully, it gives me a need for solitude. When I create, everything settles. When I create, I stop performing. I get quiet. The static drops away. Painting is my medicine, not because it fixes me, but because it remembers me.
I’ve stumbled plenty in life. I’ve missed turns. I’ve tried to please the wrong people and been on wild goose chases. But creativity has always met me with kindness. I honour it as a sacred presence, a companion and a teacher, something alive that has patiently guided me back to compassion, and back into that quiet inner space where I remember who I am beneath the striving, the shoulds, and the heavy cloak of social expectation.
As open as I try to be in the world, I am also happily, unapologetically, a reclusive soul. I find refuge in the process and in the painting space itself. When I’m working, I stop talking. Language steps aside. I am a flawed, tender human learning, slowly, how to meet each moment with more grace. Painting forgives me. It is where compassion takes form.
This is my bliss.
And because it has given me so much, I want to share that feeling with others. I love creating alongside other fellow travellers. Something opens. Something circulates. A shared field appears, a gentle, wordless sense of connection that feels both intimate and vast. And then, just as lovingly, I return to the solitude of the studio, where it’s only me and the work. The quiet dialogue that unfolds there heals me and others. It hushes the inner chatter and brings me back, again and again, to the steady heart beneath it all. Each brushstroke becomes a small doorway back to source.
I no longer think of art as something I make. It feels more accurate to say that it moves through me. Each painting seems to be seeking its own future, its own home. When a piece is finished, it no longer belongs to me, it’s already on its way elsewhere. I work often with tissue paper because it refuses control. It wrinkles. It tears. It insists on its own movement. There is something deeply human in that. It teaches me about impermanence, about letting go. The soft reconstruction, gluing, layering, trusting, becomes the lesson itself. The wrinkles, the dents, the scars remain.
And honestly? I don’t mind.
What matters is that I loved every moment of creating it.
The asemic writing that appears in my work is part of this same conversation. It’s prayer without language. A whisper from the soul rather than the mind. These marks aren’t meant to be read, they’re meant to be felt. They are presence, made visible. My own practice weaves together painting, meditation, devotional teachings, kirtan chants, Reiki and cacao, all ways of opening the heart and remembering our natural wholeness. Whether I’m painting, healing, guiding others, or holding ceremony, it’s all one awareness, one higher-feeling space, offering the same invitation: to rest, to soften, to return home.
And then there are the dots.
I return to them again and again without needing to know why. Each one feels like a breath, a heartbeat, a moment of attention. They are small meditations, mantras in paint. Their repetition calms the mind and allows stillness to widen. In their simplicity, they speak of unity, of how each tiny point belongs to something infinite.
Over time, I’ve come to understand creativity not as something separate from the spiritual path, but as its living expression. It heals through beauty, through tenderness, through the reminder that even our suffering belongs to the great dance of becoming. Some days I paint nothing. Some days I paint everything. What emerges is less about story, less about explanation and more about being.
I hope my paintings hold their own language, made of breath, tenderness, and imperfection. I hope they become part of your story, too. Words don’t always arrive easily for me; they can feel clumsy and insufficient. So instead of explaining, I invite you to enter the space.
Come and paint with me.
Sit in the studio.
Feel the rhythm.
Chant.
Drink cacao.
Work in silence.
Or simply be.
This is how I communicate best, through shared moments of creativity.
Join me, and discover for yourself what words can’t quite say.
''Over the years, my work has continued to evolve, shaped by loss, love, the sacredness of everyday moments. I paint to make space for that kind of stillness, for the extraordinary within the ordinary and the joy of imperfection''
Joanne Farley-Webb
