WATCH: Meet Salt Rock’s Leigh Bisset: mom, artist and surfer

Wearing frayed jeans shorts and a bikini top, she missions around her studio barefoot, big paintbrush in hand charged with bold colours.

“I am just loving these jellyfish. To think they have no heart and no brain, yet they are so beautiful and dangerous and mysterious. They are abstract and alien like,” said Salt Rock artist Leigh Bisset while working on her series of jellyfish paintings for an upcoming exhibition in Sydney, Australia.

The tanned, blonde, messy-bun surfer mom of three children said she had always been drawn to art.

“I was about eight years old when I went for my first art lesson and I had this single-mindedness that I wanted to be an artist. I was relentless. I did art.”

Bisset went on to complete her fine art degree in 2000, although it was not what she imagined to start with.

“For the first few weeks, all I had to do every day was learn how to mix colours. I was quite irritated, but now I can mix any colour,” said Bisset, who went on to travel around the world and ended in Sydney.

Strangely enough, she did not paint during her travels and got into branding instead.

“I fell in love with branding and did not paint for ten years. It was only when my heart called me back home to South Africa that I slowly got into art again.”

She worked as brand manager for LIV Village for nearly four years when she longed for her paint brush.

“Painting has always been my first love. I feel like it was what I was born to do. I feel I cannot paint without the spirit of God and I feel connected to God when I paint.”

Playing with a mixture of acrylic, oil and charcoal, Bisset can paint anything from architecture, portraiture to animals – as long as it is big.

“I cannot paint small. I struggle to get the expression in the brushstrokes on a small canvas. For me it is about scale. Art is about colour and it has got to be dynamic as well – if it is too tight and controlled, I think you may as well have a photo.”

Her paintings are a beautiful mix of realism meets abstract, creating a magical world that requires you to stop, engage and admire.

“I love demonstrating the skill of doing something perfectly to perspective, yet work abstractly with the realistic and having a certain looseness to my paintings.”

She said she was fueled by the constant challenge of being an artist and that you never stop learning and exploring.

“There is a freedom I would love to still find in my art where people can lose themselves in colour and light.”

Follow Leigh’s art journey on Facebook at Leigh Bisset Creative.

WATCH: Salt Rock’s Leigh Bisset in action:

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