News and Events

I have two  art courses in Term 3 of 2026:  Draw Animals on Tuesdays, starting on 14th July and Australian Landscapes in Watercolour on Thursdays, starting on 16th July. Please go to Darwin Adult Short Courses for information and booking  https://www.adultshortcourses.com/

I was delighted to be awarded the Litchfield Art Prize for Visual Art 2026 for my painting Kapok Visitors. 

This is a series of embellished ecoprints I made using the leaves of the endemic Kapok bush for dye. The prints are mounted on stretched canvas.

In July, the large, brilliant yellow flowers of the Kapok bush (Cochlospermum fraseri ) gleam among the muted colours of the open woodland. At this time of the Dry Season, these small trees, endemic to the Top End of NT and WA have lost their leaves and appear to put all their energy into flowers – but why? and what have they evolved to attract? 

I watched and sketched three populations in the Humpty Doo area where I live. On my property,  flowers were visited by a range of tiny bees which languished in the pollen of an individual flower, filling their pollen baskets before disappearing, presumably to their nest. Wasps and a hoverfly also visited the flower buds and small spiders appeared to be hunting for bees and other insects. Many of the flowers were devoured by grasshoppers. Another population was visited by stingless bees ( Tetragonula sp.) and Blue banded bees ( Amegilla sp) In the third, the only insects I saw were Great carpenter bees ( Xylocopa sp.) going from flower to flower, tree to tree and then off somewhere else, pollen baskets well filled.  This was the population which had set the most fruit, so those large bees were probably doing the job of pollination.

I have new courses: Drawing on Tuesday evenings and Watercolour Landscapes on Thursday evenings at Darwin Adult Short Courses. 

Please follow this link for more information and booking:

My 2025 Exhibition - Flower Visitors- ran at Darwin Visual Arts, Harbour View Plaza, from Friday 29th August until 20th September.  

About the Exhibition  

Some visitors are welcome guests, repaying their host perhaps with services. Others give nothing in return for hospitality. They take whatever they can get and may damage their host. So it is with flowers and animals.  

From my woodland block in Humpty Doo, I have spent many pleasant hours and days observing and recording the most conspicuous of these interactions. 

A range of Birds visiting different Eucalypts and Kurrajongs; butterflies, bees, wasps - some of them new to science - feasting on native roadside annuals; Bee-flies humming above Turkeybushes; Blue banded bees drinking from scented native Jasminum; a whole range of passers by and visitors to Native grape; cockatoos and parrots stripping seeds and those nocturnal visitors- moths, crickets, fruit bats, gliders. 

I hope that after seeing this exhibition you will view these creatures not as destructive, disease carrying nuisances but as pollinators, remarkably adapted beings, a vital part of our ecosystems and our lives

Thank you to everyone who has enrolled on my Tuesday evening Expressive Drawing course and my Thursday evening Watercolour Landscapes course... 

I am offering more courses next term: please see the DASC website:

It was exhibited at the Doubletree Hilton (the old Beaufort Hotel) on the Darwin Esplanade from Wednesday 18th September.  It is a 2m long Watercolour of the Adelaide River and some of it's fauna. A part of it is shown here. 

I dedicated to Mike. We explored this magnificent river together.

In April 2022, husband Mike Bowman and I put on a small joint exhibition at Darwin Visual Arts about Silver:  combining my drawings of the silvery Eucalyptus alba in pastel and Silverpoint, with Mike's rustic silver jewelry and tableware (which stole the show).