07/09/2026
The hunter became the hunted.
I love looking beyond the familiar descriptions of the goddesses I paint and into the actual myths surrounding them.
Artemis isn't simply the beautiful “goddess of nature” we sometimes see her reduced to.
She could be fierce, uncompromising and even frightening.
The story of Artemis and Actaeon is particularly fascinating.
After Actaeon encounters the goddess bathing, Artemis transforms him into a stag. His own hunting dogs pursue him and ultimately kill him.
It's brutal.
But there is something fascinating in the reversal at the centre of the story. A hunter enters Artemis's world and suddenly he becomes the hunted.
And perhaps this is part of why these ancient stories continue to fascinate me.
These goddesses weren't created to be agreeable.
They were powerful, complicated women with agency — women who protected, created, destroyed, loved, fought and refused to quietly accept what was done to them.
When I paint them, I'm not really trying to recreate ancient Greece.
I'm interested in what these women might still have to say to us.
And Artemis has rather a lot to say about boundaries.
