You could call Amber Emm the accidental artist. She wasn’t very good at reading, or writing, or spelling. Her happy place was always drawing. She never thought it would be something she would end up doing as a career. But now she’s an award-winning floral artist with her work featured in high end galleries across Auckland.
“You dream about it, you hope it will happen, you sort of wonder ‘Will I ever break through?’ It’s like anything, if you keep at it, it will get better,” she says from her small home studio nestled in the outskirts of Whenuapai, West Auckland. With light streaming in through the French windows, and the soft echo of her latest romance audiobook humming through the room, she is hard at work painting her latest piece. A bunch of pink roses. Amber wasn’t always a floral artist. “I really enjoy boats and coastal New Zealand, it’s where we live and what I enjoy. But with my teaching, one of my ladies was doing a lot of floral work and just with helping her I thought they were pretty cool and quite challenging. Having never done them before, I went into that field because of the challenge of trying to create them,” she says, her eyes never leaving the canvas as she paints a smooth and precise green vein of a leaf. For Amber, it is about capturing the beauty of life. “We are surrounded by beauty every day, it’s just about trying to zero in on things that are beautiful,” she says. Her red framed glasses speckled with flecks of old white paint as she focuses on mixing more green paint, the walls covered in paint from countless paintings. Amber’s work is recognised for her use of colour, with the high depth and contrast used by her to create pieces of photorealism. See more about Amber here.
