Gabrielle Nicoll is a landscape and seascape painter who loves using oils for the feel, the smell of the paint and the way it moves across the canvas.  Her studio smells of oil paints and linseed oil and for Gabrielle, that says she’s home.

Living on a farm at Castle Forbes Bay in the Huon valley, Gabrielle’s studio is set up in the old original, mostly unlined, apple shed with its foundations made of large river stones.  With the Castle Forbes rivulet only metres from the shed and windows that face north to the old growth forest on the hill behind her home, she can listen to water rushing by on its way to the bay as she works. It is peaceful and idyllic, but cold as charity in the winter time! There is inspiration all around her.

Gabrielle is always looking, trying to store memories of places she has been and places that touch her soul. She finds that she needs to paint what she sees before the memory fades. “Sometimes the paint just flows,” she says, “the painting shows me which way to go, what it wants.  Other times it feels like it’s being ripped from my soul. Being an artist, for me, is a constant need to produce what I see, what I feel.  It’s who I am.”

Gabrielle wants her paintings to allow you to enter, to escape, to find a place to breathe, rest, think, exhale.