Gillian’s fine art paintings begin with tea. Before painting she embeds actual tea leaves, dried herbs, and botanicals directly into the paint surface. Gillian says “It's an unusual process, and one I arrived at through experimentation rather than instruction.”

Gillian says “What I'm really painting is the weather, naturally. The Eastern Shore is atmospheric in a way that's hard to explain until you've watched a fog bank move across the lake at dawn, or seen how a November sky flattens the colour out of everything. I let the tea leaves guide the composition with the help of gravity — tossed across the canvas, moving freely until nature's own logic takes over. I respond to what forms. Step close, and the surface breathes with texture and accident. Step back, and a world appears.”

Gillian came to painting after two decades as an interior designer, which means she think about surface and structure in ways that are hard to switch off. Gillian builds her own poplar frames and works in oil paint layered over materials like roofing rubber. The process carries the philosophy that she keeps coming back to — wabi-sabi, the idea that beauty lives in the impermanent, the irregular, and the incomplete. These landscapes don't resolve so much as breathe.