After half a life time of being told I would never have a baby, I found myself pregnant. He was born in California, healthy, happy and wide awake in 2017, I was 44. By 2020 forest fires and the shenanigans of the world closed doors on my beloved mountains of Lake Tahoe and his father and I brought him back here to New Zealand, where we flew into a trap we couldn’t leave for two years.
By the time the doors opened to those who did the thing that divided the world back then, his father and I were living separately, and he wanted to get back to California to visit the American family.
I couldn’t say no. We’d birthed a confident, adaptable, equally secure with both parents, bi-country baby.
I was mandated from travel. He was 4. I said goodbye for a month, cried a world of tears, let go my grasp on everything, watched him board the silver bird to fly 6,000 miles away, bought a canvas, so big I had to strap it to the roof of my car, got it home, picked up a brush and started to paint.
No training, no vision, no clue on paint, fixing or sealing. No idea what would come out, or that within the next couple of years I would join the local art trail two years running, host my own gallery exhibition (with a fun opening party), be accepted to exhibit at the NZ Art Show and invited back for 2026, be featured on the local radio as well as published in a Moon Calendar and Diary, twice, as well as two times in the international ART EDIT Magazine, and featured in their international online gallery.
It’s been a bold, rich and profound journey, following my own personal instructions, one step at a time, as the creative Nature of my inner self unfurls frond by frond. Art has taught me to more deeply trust my whims and heed the calls that always know what to do next, even when I am a bawling puddle of snot on the ground, which can happen often when a grieving heart is being transformed through the arms of art.
That little boy, now 8, is my favorite being on the planet, fun, quirky, sensitive, creative, and oh so smart and funny. Truly my greatest creation ever. The gratitude I hold to his daddy for somehow, seemingly miraculously, alchemizing with me to bring him to us is eternal.
There’s actually no before. I’ve always been an artist. I’d just never had a brush and paint before, until 2022 when my kid and his dad boarded the plane I wasn’t to be on. Instead my art was in word-smithing and mentoring. I was a hypnotherapist and past life regressionist for 20 years — the art of dancing through the universes contained within the subconscious mind is one nothing short of profound. I taught yoga and meditation, bowed to the feet of Sally Kempton and Jun Po Roshi, created workshops and evolutionary experiences for seekers; until my teachers passed and I realized so doing only plugged you into some one or thing other than the source of your own being.
Once I discovered the vocal silence that never comes and goes, I realized that most therapeutic processes just recycle our stories and trap us in limiting patterns we continue to engage, until we stop.
Abstract art, and all it’s multi faceted layers, was my stop to the patterns that kept me small and stuck. Now I paint, big and bold. I don’t care if I’m too much or too loud. I’m just me, doing me. Being love.
I describe my work as “collaborative abstract art” – each piece, a conversation with the cavas, an excavation of the eternal now, layer upon layer, revealing and concealing, until the painting is found, a message disclosed, dialogue complete, the canvas now free to share it’s story with it’s viewer.
Drawn to large scale work, dancing with mixed media and acrylic paint, inspired by the natural pace of nature, radical life transitions and the eternal winds of change, my work, laden with texture and richness, is steeped in the unfurling fronds of life transition, the stories that would otherwise never be told and the eternal winds of change.
A purée of play, exploration, doubt, joy, uncertainty and curiosity pave a seductive path through my home which has become studio, gallery, sanctuary, cocoon… the womb of my crone, the wisening of my inner mother and this art.. all dance together here, in the soup of life, rewriting the future, one step at a time.
When I’m not at my easel, in nature or with my young son, I offer mentorship for creatives in living what I call The One Step Plan for Redesigning Your Life by Returning to Yourself. How I paint is how I live and how I live is how I paint, one step at a time.
I’m glad you’re here.
Much love,
Carmel Boone
Published in:
“How wonderfully Carmel Boone’s abstract painting has captured a moment in time! It instantly suggested to me a reset or recheck of oneself within a fluid moment, being the perfect piece to consider in an entry hall where transition is central to the space.”
before i start to paint
it’s not me
who’s painting
it’s a compliance
with my source energy
that unfurls
like nature
from the inside out
void
of art-school rules
or any kind of discipline
at all
just a dialogue
with my own source
pouring out
my inner realms
handing over
of who i think i am
and all that i am not
until the canvas stops talking
and the moment is complete
with a new creation
staring me in the eye
with a story
I’ve only just now heard
each layer of life
a new path
another emergence
of life’s great mystery
frond by frond
like nature
no plan
no vision
just unfurling
dreaming
life
into existence
one breath
one step
from the inside out
i look forward
to sharing this journey
with you
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