Hello! My name is Jeanne-Marie Persaud.

Born in Trinidad my interest in art started in my teens when I would accompany my mum to the ‘mas camp’ where she worked on costumes for Carnival, Trinidad’s famous festival.  I was interested in the bright colours and textures of the various fabrics and enjoyed being amongst the buzz in the camp with artists busy at work.   

I come from an ancestral lineage of Indian, Chinese, Portuguese and Welsh.  I believe there is so much to discover in life – both physically in discovering new places and cultures as well as spiritually by looking inwards and understanding our own makeup and relationship with the outer world. It is this curiosity that summoned me to other shores.  

I left the Caribbean in 1998 for the UK where I lived for a few years before migrating to Australia.  I returned to England in 2018 and have been painting consistently from my studio at home in North Yorkshire.

I take a lot of photos of my surroundings be it on walks in nature or wandering through towns; there is always something that catches my eye – a weathered post, rusty metal or the play of light and shadow. I am interested in the process of life and decay and the energies that I feel when observing this transition. Interestingly I do not work from the photographs I take but subconsciously the colours and textures do often feed into my paintings.

I have dabbled using many mediums and surfaces nearly as much as I’ve moved around the globe! I mostly work on canvas and wood panel using acrylic paint, oil sticks, pastels and collage to build up layers of texture. I enjoy an interchanging process of application, texture, colour and pattern and would sometimes sand to reveal vestiges of this process before working into it further using glazes.

It is not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see

Henry David Thoreau

My paintings are in private residences in the UK, USA, Caribbean and Australia. If you would like to have something specially created for your personal space I also do commissions.