Hi! My name is Alex and I grew up in Whistler, Canada, a small mountain town that runs on its seasons and its scenery — not so different from the island I’d end up calling home. My introduction to painting happened when I was four years old, sitting beside Patricia, my Columbian nanny and a professional painter. Patty started me on arts and crafts, but the moment she saw I had an interest in painting she set me up with a little canvas and the fruit we had around the house. Seeing the joy on her face when I showed her my first painting gave me a love for artwork that would never go away.

I painted constantly through childhood, mostly self-taught but always with Patty in my corner. Later I trained in fine art at Bishops University, where I got to experiment with charcoal, clay, watercolour and textiles — but I always came back to oil on canvas. It’s still where I feel most like myself.

For most of my life, painting wasn’t my job - it was my escape. It was the thing I did in the middle of the night, Taylor Swift music on repeat, to feel like me again after a long day. I assumed being a full-time artist wasn’t a sensible path, so I kept looking for what I was “supposed” to do. What changed me was community: being around people who were unapologetically themselves gave me the nerve to ask whether my hobby could be more. A friend asked me to paint something for her — my first real commission — and when she asked why I wasn’t sharing my work publicly, I didn’t have a good answer. So I stopped hiding it.

My life changed when I moved from Canada to Cayman in 2020 right before the global pandemic. I’d left a job and a community I loved, and I poured all of that into the biggest, boldest painting I’d ever attempted: a huge canvas of lemons. I called it “Lulu’s Lemons”, a thank-you to the community that gave me the confidence to call myself an artist.

Cayman brightened everything — my palette, my subjects, and the light I chase. My work hangs at The Studio in the Kimpton Seafire, I show every year at Cayman Art Week, and I’ve painted commissions for clients as far away as Spain. But what I love most hasn’t changed since I was four: I paint to make people happy. When someone stops in front of a canvas and smiles, that’s why I do this. That’s what I hope you’ll find on the wall — the colour, the joy, and yes, the lemons.