When did you start your creative practice and why?
I think I was born to make art, my mum said I was around three years old when she noticed my creativity. I was lucky to grow up in a really supportive family, it never felt like something I had to explain or justify — it’s just part of me.
I enjoy using my imagination; it opens up whole new world of stories within my work. I also really enjoy people’s reactions to my art — that connection is really an important part of the process for me.
I became professional in 2007, the same year I had my first exhibition at View from The Top Gallery in Nottingham. It meant a great deal to me, especially as it was in our local city near where I grew up — being shown there felt special and stayed with me. I am an ambitious artist and love to exhibit my pieces in exhibitions, whether it’s an open call or gallery representation.
How would you describe your artistic style to someone unfamiliar with
your work?
I’m a multidisciplinary contemporary symbolist artist working fluidly between acrylic
painting, digital surrealist collage, and mixed media, with a practice that spans portraiture, animal works, and atmospheric landscape. My work sits between dream and memory between the earthly and the transcendent. Everything I create is symbolic and carries meaning, whether the subject is a face, a lion, or a landscape at dusk.
Each piece belongs to one continuous visual language, emerging from the same internal source regardless of medium or subject. I do not separate my practice into isolated ideas the concept, emotion, and technique all evolve together. My mind is my primary reference point; what I see, feel, and internally experience becomes the starting structure, and the work evolves through an ongoing dialogue between perception, intuition, and material response.
My painted portraiture leans into luminous and otherworldly. My eyes are oversized because they are windows to the soul always searching, always gazing upward toward something beyond. The floral crowns that appear throughout my work are rooted in ancient symbolism the Day of the Dead’s tradition of flowers as offerings to the beloved, pagan seasonal ritual, the idyllic and the sacred. Each flower is chosen deliberately. Each one carries someone, something, a season of life.
In Cosmically I’m Yours, gold mica falls like starlight around a figure crowned in roses. My gold is never decorative it represents illumination, the endurance of the spirit, and the eternal bonds of love that do not break even when a person is gone. This piece carries the feeling of saying to those you love, living or lost: I have not left you. I am forever here. Cosmically yours.
My mixed media work deepens this language through tactile surface and material. In
Fragments of My Mind, hand-cut mirror pieces represent a reflection of you what I saw and remembered. The mirrors reflect the viewer back into the work, because the fragments we carry the memories, the losses, the people who shaped us are what make us who we are.
Alongside mirror I incorporate gold leaf, metallic foils, gold mica, and pen and ink a
signature technique I developed myself, where material and meaning are inseparable.
My digital surrealist works construct entire inner worlds. In Resilience, a figure’s mind
becomes the planet itself a polar bear crossing an eclipsed world held above wildfire and ocean, suspended in cosmic space. It is simultaneously a psychological and environmental portrait, where the internal and the universal become one. The personal and the planetary are not separate. The polar is continually walking the earth once fed by the sea now poisoned by the see that feeds her. It is a symbol of resilience, strength and hope.
My animal works are symbolic portraits of emotional states. The Lion in the Night is not a wildlife painting he is a silently navigating the darkness with quiet dignity, a symbol of inner resilience and strength during the hardest moments in life, looking for strength and light as he walks the path, finding his path.
My landscape practice carries an impressionist symbolic sensibility colour, light, and
atmosphere used to express emotional perception and physical description, developed through series including Ethereal, exhibited at East Midlands Airport in 2012.
A piece can take days or months it is finished when the dialogue between intuition and material feels complete. And alongside all the visual work, I write — short poetic texts that don’t explain the art but extend it, image and language working together so the viewer can find their own meaning within the work.
Originality is central to everything not only in idea, but in the development of my personal visual language where symbolism, materiality, and technique are inseparable.
What themes or ideas do you find yourself returning to most often?
My practice is symbolic, using recurring motifs such as roses, celestial elements and animals. These symbols carry personal meaning but remain open to interpretation.
The moonflower, dahlia and rose each hold personal references. Gold is used as part of the emotional language of the work, guiding focus and building feeling within the surface. Eyes are often a focal point in my work, carrying emotion and narrative.
I also work with compositional structure influenced by the Fibonacci sequence, which
appears intuitively in the way I create my pieces.
The celestial remains a constant presence the moon, Venus, Jupiter and the wider
universe forming an ongoing thread throughout my practice.
What is your creative process from idea to finished piece is it always
the same?
My thoughts turn into visuals. They begin as a thought process, something turning over quietly in my mind sometimes long before a mark is made. That process lives in journals, in research, in reading, and in reflection — but also in sketches, photography, and reference materials that I gather and work with until the work then revealing its own direction.
It sometimes can be instant a thought that immediately becomes a visual, the news and events captured me as in Resilience or it can take months before the work is ready to emerge. Because everything is symbolic from the first thought, the process of making is never separate from the process of meaning. Even the way I paint even hair carries intention, its direction and colour, movement through the composition are never incidental. Every technical decision is a symbolic one. Technique and meaning are completely inseparable.
My process includes sketching my ideas as well as living with them, writing about them, researching around them. The sketch, the journal, the reference photograph are all part of the same conversation. None of it is just preparation for the work. All of it is the work.
Visual references matter. I use Adobe and my creative apps to gather and organise references wherever I am, whether I’m on the go or working in my home studio. A photograph of pink roses at St Paul’s Cathedral. A starry night sky. A particular quality of light. These are not incidental. They feed into the symbolic and visual language of each piece, and the ability to capture and work with them in the moment means the process never stops it moves between worlds and the studio.
And when my paintings begin. My thoughts are visualised onto the canvas and however long the process has taken to reach that moment, the act of painting always feels natural. Like arriving somewhere I was always heading.
Is there a particular piece of yours that feels especially meaningful?
Why?
It is difficult to choose because I pour my deepest inner thoughts my soul goes into all of my works. They are me and my world or another world that collided into my own.
Cosmically I’m Yours is me, crowned in roses, gold falling around me like stars falling. It carries what I feel but cannot always say aloud: I have not left you. I am forever here. Cosmically yours. The gold is not decoration. It is the presence of a bond that does not break. Winter Solstice is me in the longest night, crowned in moonflowers — the flower that blooms only in darkness, that needs the night to open. The halo of light above is the new dawn breaking, new life beginning. And perhaps the souls that once were, still luminous, still near.
Resilience is my response to the world I live in and feel, its my protest against Climate
change. A figure whose mind becomes the planet — a polar bear crossing an eclipsed earth above wildfire and ocean, held in cosmic space. The polar bear is strength. It is hope. It is mother earth, under pressure, still standing.
My portraits of Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain are part of my world too — souls whose hunger for originality and raw feeling I have always carried with me. Rendered in gold leaf and acrylic, they are symbolic emotional journeys as much as portraits.
The Lion in the Night is me navigating darkness with quiet dignity. Inner strength.
Resilience. All of these are symbolic emotional journeys — and perhaps they resonate because they come from somewhere completely true. Summer Solstice is now in progress. Another portrait painting coming to life from another world soon.
Who are the artists — past or present — who have strongly influenced
you?
Gustav Klimt: the gold, the decorative opulence, the feminine divine, the sense that a face can be simultaneously portrait and symbol. His influence runs perhaps deepest of all. Frida Kahlo: the refusal to separate life from art. The self-portrait as a way of understanding rather.
Claude Monet: mood, atmosphere, the way colour carries emotion rather than describing what is there. He was a founder of his own craft originality breaking from tradition using his art as his own voice to break free.
Andy Warhol: The Pop Art era, an era of color and messages that were reaching out in new directions. Yayoi Kusama and David Bowie: sharing a longing toward the universe, the sense that art can reach beyond the earthly into something infinite. New meanings, touched by their own souls.
The musicians Jim Morrison, known as The American Poet, and Kurt Cobain. Not as
painters, but as creative souls. Morrison was a published poet as much as a rock icon a man who understood words and image and feeling were inseparable. Cobain carried that same raw, unguarded truth in everything he made. What connects all of these figures is that they prioritised feeling over formula. None of them made work to fit in. And neither do I.
How has your style or perspective evolved over time?
My style does evolve with me and also stays with me when I need to go back and I think that is exactly how my art should be. I enjoy reinventing and evolving myself and my practice. I enjoy learning new techniques and discovering what they can bring to the work. I don’t feel bound to only one way of working as my collectors will instantly recognise that about my work. That openness is something I want to protect.
How do you balance artistic expression with practical concerns like income, marketing, and social media?
I find that balance comes fairly naturally to me — though there are moments, usually when I am deep in developing a new series, where I need to step back and think. Those are the times I’ll read, write, or work quietly in my journal rather than sharing publicly. I need that private space for the work to breathe before it meets the world.
But social media genuinely feels like my outside space — where the stories behind the work can live and grow. I love sharing the journey as the art develops, not just the finished piece.
The process is part of the art. Website design is something I enjoy too; I build and design my own site, and I am told my marketing instincts are strong. I think it is because I genuinely care about how the work is communicated, not just created.
Have you got a project, award, or idea you are excited to share?
Yes, I’m always excited to share and celebrate the art I create there is a great deal to share. This year has been an exciting year in April 2026 I participated in a curated exhibition at the Royal Over-Seas League House (ROSL), St. James St, London, organised by the curator artistic-PNK in collaboration with The World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS). I am a founding member of Planetary Arts — ‘The World We Want’ — an international initiative exploring contemporary art for Climate change and peace for the planet. From this framework I am developing a new digital collage series that directly evolves from The World We Want, extending its conceptual structure into my own visual language. From this creation and exhibition work Resilience has also been selected for feature on the updated Tagsmart platform, with forthcoming linkage to the British Library — supporting long-term archival documentation of my practice. Tagsmart is where my work is verified and shows provenance in the Tagsmart Certificate of Authenticity, I have been a member for many
years.
Recent press includes features in Artseen Magazine (2024) for Your Sweetness is My
Weakness, Derbyshire Life Magazine (2025), Art Culture Tourism Magazine with Marysia Zipser, and Art in Lockdown (2021). Awarded selected Artist winner 3 times- Three of my works selected by jury for exhibition on the Big Screen Plaza, Times Square, New York — Cosmically I’m Yours, Winter Solstice, and Emergence — with additional presentation through ACT – Art Culture Tourism, featuring
my Elvis portrait Red on Gold.
Currently in development as mentioned is the Solstice portraits works exploring the seasons of a life — inspired by Dantes Inferno, it begins as a grief-informed body of work exploring descent, transformation, and renewal through mythological and the astrological. And I’m excited to announce the upcoming group show represented by Hopton Hall Gallery, Ashbourne, Derbyshire in August 2026 this marks the next public presentation of my work.
If your work could evoke one feeling or reaction in viewers, what would
it be?
It’s a moment of wonder. A quiet interior opening when something beautiful or true catches you off guard. I want viewers to feel the luminous — to look up, as my figures always do, and find it waiting there.
What is your website and how do we find you on social media?
Website: artbymandy.com
Instagram: @artbymandyuk
Facebook: @artbymandyuk
Art by Mandy UK • artbymandy.com • COA Tagsmart Certified
