Swimming with Whales: The Experiences Behind My Paintings

Like most artists, I paint best when inspired by lived experience.

And when you gaze into the eye of a 40-tonne humpback whale, it tends to stay with you.

If you're handy with a paintbrush, it's also a moment you want to recreate on canvas.

We’ve been fortunate enough to swim with whales several times over the years, and those encounters have completely changed the way I paint them.

My first swim with a humpback whale

My first experience was in Hervey Bay, Queensland.

I'd seen humpbacks from boats before. When Dave and I lived in Sydney, we would often head out to watch them as they migrated past the Heads.

But seeing a whale from the surface and actually getting into the water with one are two completely different things.

It was a choppy August day in Hervey Bay, with sea spray smashing us in the face and several humpbacks moving around the boat.

The underwater visibility was, at best, about three metres.

Then a gigantic shadow appeared.

Out of the blue-green water came a humpback, close enough for me to see its enormous eye.

For a moment, we simply floated there looking at each other.

That encounter has never left me.

From minke whales on the Great Barrier Reef to humpbacks in Tonga

Living in Port Douglas has given us another kind of whale encounter.

Each year, dwarf minke whales visit the northern Great Barrier Reef, and Dave has been lucky enough to swim with them several times on reef trips and liveaboards.

They are slimmer and more elusive than humpbacks, with an entirely different energy.

I've painted minkes using Dave's photographs for reference, but humpbacks have always appealed to me more. There’s something about their shape, scale and the way they move through the water that suits the way I paint.

In 2023, Dave travelled to Tonga during humpback season.

He came home with photographs of heat runs, playful calves and mothers resting below the surface while their babies explored above them.

Naturally, I immediately started collecting reference images for paintings.

But something wasn't quite clicking.

As beautiful as Dave's photographs were, when I painted them I kept thinking about my own experience in Hervey Bay; that enormous shadow emerging from limited visibility and the feeling of looking directly into a whale's eye.

I realised I needed another encounter of my own.

So, in 2024, we headed to Tonga.

Swimming with humpback whales in Haʻapai

After three flights and a few memorable lifts in local cars, Dave, our son Elliot, Dave's mum Julie and I arrived in Haʻapai.

It was everything you'd imagine from a remote Pacific island: blue water, huts on the sand, fresh coconuts and whales visible almost from the shoreline.

Over five days, Dave and I had more humpback encounters than we could count.

The most memorable were with mothers and their young calves.

The mothers would often sink deeper into the water to rest while their calves stayed closer to the surface.

Once they became comfortable with our presence, the calves seemed delighted to have something new to investigate.

They zoomed around us, rolled, splashed and showed off like enormous underwater toddlers.

At the time, I was newly pregnant with our second son, Jamie, and dealing with morning sickness, seasickness and exhaustion.

Perhaps because of that, I felt particularly drawn to the mothers.

On several occasions, a female humpback separated from the others and approached me closely.

Whether she sensed anything or I was simply reading my own experience into the moment, I'll never know.

But standing – or rather floating – beside an animal of that size while we were both carrying or caring for young was incredibly moving.

Painting whales from memory

Those experiences have changed the way I paint whales.

When I first started, photographs were essential. I'd study the shape of a body, the angle of a fin or the curve of a tail.

These days, I find myself relying less on them.

I've spent enough time watching whales move that I can often paint from memory, tracing the curve of a back or the sweep of a fluke and thinking about the feeling of being underwater beside them.

That's the thing about painting.

It isn't simply reproducing what something looks like.

Our work carries pieces of where we've been, what we've seen and the moments that have stayed with us.

For me, every whale painting carries a little of Hervey Bay, the Great Barrier Reef and those extraordinary days in Tonga.

I feel very lucky to have experienced them.

And even luckier that I get to bring a little of that feeling home to the gallery.