Through my paintings I hope to evoke connection to this incredible world we share, inviting the viewer to pause and appreciate its beauty.
Hello and welcome! ’m Belinda Dorey.
I’m a fine artist capturing memories and sense of place.
My story began by Awaba, Lake Macquarie, not too far from where I currently live. I enjoyed a childhood exploring its shores, salty depths and abundant bushland. It was this formative time in nature that shaped my reverence for the natural world.
I began painting full time in 2021 after a back injury abruptly ended my job in nursing. Art has always been my joy and drawing a lifelong love, sketching family members, pets and everything around me as a child.
Convinced by others after leaving school, that a career in art wasn’t a real job, I gained an apprenticeship as a Signwriter, traditional style, brushes and paint. After completing my trade, adventure called, and I set off with a friend on a lap of Australia.
Two years in I found work on Kangaroo Island and quickly fell in love with its wild rugged beauty and pristine turquoise waters. The island became my base for the next two decades.
I quickly fell in love with its wild rugged beauty and pristine turquoise waters.
Home to a thriving arts community, I was introduced to pastels and quickly came to love the medium for its immediate and expressive qualities. I can still remember my joy at being able to draw in colour and a very productive period followed where I began to show and sell my work, encouraged when awarded prizes at local art exhibitions.
Returning to live in Newcastle in 2011 I did workshops in oils. Their bendability, rich hues and slow drying time appealed to me, but working full time and raising two teenagers left very little time for painting.
Be careful what you wish for! I’d been longing to have more time for art, when suddenly one morning in 2020 I woke in severe pain and unable to walk properly. So began a long slow recovery of walking and swimming in water. Water had always been my favourite subject matter to paint, the thing I most enjoyed but now it became a lifeline.
Swimming and painting water became a powerful form of healing.
These days you’ll find me in my dream studio, a large, converted shed, or painting on a beach or headland somewhere, absorbed in capturing the light and atmosphere, grateful every single day that I am right where I’m meant to be.
Wherever I am though, what really moves me to paint is the desire to render my response to the beauty around me.