A Bit About Me
Louise B
I grew up in West London — Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill, the real deal, not the postcard version. Saturday mornings meant Portobello Market in the 1990s: music in the air, street food, people from every background, fruit and veg stalls beside antiques and art, the whole street alive with colour and energy. It was the kind of place that gets into you and never leaves.
Creativity has always been a constant. For several years I channelled it into making bespoke celebration cakes. The work satisfied my need to create something beautiful with my hands, but it was never the whole story. The creativity was there; the medium wasn’t right.
Life brought its share of adversity, and moving through it gave me something unexpected: clarity. In my thirties, after becoming a mum to two incredible daughters, I found the courage to return to college and finally pursue the work I had always been drawn towards.
I left college feeling disappointed with what I had learnt and unconvinced that I had found my voice. In hindsight, that disappointment was necessary. It pushed me away from trying to create what I thought I should make and towards discovering what genuinely interested me. Since then, my practice has been driven by experimentation, instinct and spontaneity.
I’m not searching for a fixed style. Instead, I respond to memory, emotion, music, lived experience and the visual influences I encounter along the way. I want each piece to reveal itself rather than follow a formula. Evolution is part of the process; I would rather surprise myself than bore myself.
Today my practice spans mixed media, watercolour, sketches, oil and acrylic painting. My subjects range from animals used as metaphor, to the human form, from social commentary to deeply personal narratives. And sometimes I simply paint for the joy of it — no rules, just colour and shape, like a child. What connects the work is not a visual style, but intention. Every piece is made to communicate something meaningful.
From West London to Gloucester, my surroundings have changed, but the impulse remains the same: to create work that is honest, alive and continually evolving, made with rizz and rigour.
My daughters shape everything I do. I want them to grow up knowing that creativity is not a luxury but a birth right. I want them to understand the value of self-expression, curiosity and freedom, and to see what becomes possible when someone finally gives themselves permission to be fully themselves, I am finding that hard, to put myself out there, but for them, it is exactly what I will do. For me to teach them how to love and accept themselves for who they are, I must lead the way.
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