Becoming Her — on painting my daughter, losing and finding myself again

I have been away for nearly two years.

Nursing school took everything I had, which was the right trade to make, but it meant the studio went quiet in a way that felt increasingly permanent the longer it went on. I told myself I would come back when things settled. You probably know how that story goes.

Things don't settle. You just eventually decide to stop waiting for them to.

The first painting I finished on the other side of all that was this one. A portrait of my youngest daughter, at eleven years old, painted life-size. I called it Becoming Her.

The painting

The process flowed in a way that felt like a gift after such a long absence. There was the usual resistance, that quiet internal friction that is just a normal and unremarkable part of making anything, nothing dramatic, nothing that stopped me. I've learned not to mistake resistance for a sign that something is wrong. It's just weather. You paint through it.

She stands in the centre of the canvas with a Labubu and Skull Pandas swinging from her bag, and a therian mask she made herself in her hand. She looks off into the middle distance with that particular composure that eleven year olds sometimes have, somehow both completely certain of themselves and utterly unguarded at the same time. I wanted to capture that specific threshold she's standing on, the last stretch of childhood before the world starts asking her to explain herself.

If you look closely at the background, you'll find her own drawings transferred faithfully in pencil, woven into all that gestural colour and movement. Her imagination is literally the world surrounding her. I wanted the painting to be full of her, not just her likeness but her actual creative life, the things she makes and collects and becomes through. An observant eye will find them. Some people will miss them entirely. I like that.

Her figure is painted with everything I have. Every hour of looking, every year of practice. And then I let the background stay loose, gestural, almost chaotic, because that felt like the truth of this moment in her life and in mine.

The abstraction isn't decorative. It speaks to something I think about a lot in my work, the way we are always in the process of creating and recreating ourselves, never quite finished, never fully resolved. And underneath that, something I find endlessly moving, the idea that we are connected to something much larger than our own edges. All that unresolved colour and movement around her isn't chaos. It's everything she is part of, and doesn't know yet.

And she loves the painting, which matters more to me than I expected.

The rejection

I submitted Becoming Her to the Adam Portraiture Award. It wasn't accepted.

I want to be honest about how that landed, because I think artists are expected to absorb these things gracefully and move on, and I did eventually, but not immediately. The Adam is the award I want to win one day. Not for vanity, or not only for vanity, but because it would mean something real about the work. It would legitimise twenty five years of painting in a way that feels important to me, in a country where I sometimes feel my work is better known internationally than it is at home.

So yes. That one kicked me.

I sat with it for a little while. And then I posted the painting anyway, quietly, without much preamble, because it deserved to be seen regardless of what a panel of judges decided. The response reminded me of something I keep having to relearn: the relationship between my work and the people who receive it doesn't run through a selection committee. It never did.

Coming back

Two years of nursing has given me more to say as a painter, not less. I look at people differently now. I see what people carry, what they hide, what flickers across a face in an unguarded moment. I think that's going to show up in the work in ways I'm only beginning to understand.

I still have paintings to create. I'm not done, not even close.

Until next time,

Meredith x

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Becoming Her is available in two ways. The original oil painting, life-size, is available directly from me here for $7,800 NZD including shipping within NZ— if you'd like to know more, just get in touch and we can talk. For those who'd like to live with this painting in a different way, a high resolution digital download sized for printing up to A3 is available in my shop for $25 NZD. Two very different price points, the same image, the same intention behind every brushstroke.