Permission to Come Aboard: Meet Watercolour Artist Tracy Christina

It was a magical spring evening. The kind when the weather has turned, there’s a warmth to the breeze that promises summer. The sky was clear, a few puffs of white clouds breaking up the expanse of blue. I stood on my back deck and heard the distinctive cry of barn swallows, and looked up to watch them swooping through the sky above the canal. 

There’s something about the way swallows swoop and sway across the sky, as though they are borne on pure joy. As they soared, so did my heart, and the tears came unbidden. I had only just moored up at this spot earlier in the day, and yet it felt like home. 

I've been aboard for nearly a year, and I'm still not entirely used to the idea that this is my life now. However it seemed about time I properly introduced myself.

I'm Tracy Christina — watercolour artist, portrait painter, writer, and reluctant adult. I live and

work on a widebeam narrowboat on the Grand Union Canal, which means my studio comes with ducks (which are most decidedly NOT in a row!)

HOW I SEE THE WORLD - watercolour, aphantasia, and colour

Here's something interesting about me: I have aphantasia. It means I can't see anything in my mind’s eye. If you ask me to picture a red apple, there's nothing there — no apple, no colour, no shape. Just the concept of an apple.

You might wonder how on earth someone like that becomes an artist. I've wondered that myself.

What I've come to understand is that it means I have to be entirely  present with whatever I'm painting. I can’t hold a picture in my mind - so I have to be present with the subject, immerse myself in all of my other senses. What does it feel like? What colours can I see? What is it saying to me? It often turns into a form of meditation, and I can lose hours - it’s often my cats, Olive and Merlin who remind me to stop, as they start to vocalise their need for dinner - and as soon as they do that, I come back to myself and realise that my bladder was full 2 hours ago, I’m parched, and most definitely should not have skipped breakfast!

I like to think that see colour more vividly than most people do - of course I can’t see through someone else’s eyes to prove that, but when I make art, you get to see through mine.  I see colours in things that others simply don't notice. I'll look at a grey horse and find purples and blues in its coat. I'll see gold and lavender in a shadow. I don't know if this is connected to the aphantasia — some sort of compensation the brain made — or whether I was just born this way. Either way, it's the thing that shapes everything I paint.

I also want to mention (and I say this knowing it will either resonate with you or make you quietly back away) that animals sometimes tell me things. Not always. Not even most of the time. But occasionally, when I sit with an animal's photograph before I begin to paint, I get a feeling. A sense of something about them. Once or twice, an animal has made it quite clear they'd rather not be painted at all. (I respect that. I move on.)

Joy can be such a fragile thing when you're young, so easily broken.

And like trust, it can take a long time to heal.

I've been drawing since I was a little girl. It was just always there — pencil to paper, hand moving, something inside settling.

My art teachers noticed. I was encouraged by my art teachers, and they occasionally held my work up for others to see as an example. And of course, kids can be cruel sometimes, so I was bullied for that (I have always been a bit of an oddball, and didn’t really know how to socialise with others.)

Because of that bullying, and because of subsequent examples as an adult where I was brave enough to show my work to someone and was rejected or sneered at, I shut the door on art, and turned my back on it completely, because there was suddenly no joy in something that didn’t feel safe to express openly. 

Grief has a habit of shifting your foundations.

I am often asked, “what made you move onto a boat?”

There are many reasons. But the thread running through all of those reasons was a feeling like the life I was leading wasn’t meant for me. I was reacting instead of creating. And that feeling was made sharper by a series of losses over the course of just a couple of years - my beloved stepfather. My biological father. A friend who left far too young. Each loss causing me to evaluate and ask myself “what am I doing here? What is the point? The purpose?”

And then, in August 2024, my dog Roxie died.

Roxie had been my reason, for a long time, to imagine a different kind of life — one where we could spend the days in each other's company, going for rambling walks, painting and writing, not sitting in an office absorbing other people's urgency. I'd spent years wanting that life. Wishing for it. And then she was gone, and I realised I'd spent more time wishing for that new life than I had making it happen. 

So I stopped waiting.

I decluttered a whole house (a gargantuan task — I am not a naturally organised person), put it on the market, set my intention to the universe, and asked for the right person to arrive. She did. An artist herself (and a teacher) with plans to convert the garage into a studio. Of course she was. And - she loved my art. 

Contracts exchanged, I offered on the first boat I saw. Three weeks later, I moved aboard. 

I've often been told that I am brave and courageous

for turning my life upside down. But I'm still making it all up as I go along!

But the decisions that led me here didn't feel like choices - they felt more like I was being pulled by an invisible thread. Now, I wake up on the water. I paint what sings to me — animals, wildlife, portraits of beloved companions, the light on the canal at six in the morning or at night. I am commissioned to paint portraits for people who want their pets, their horses, family and friends - their most deeply loved companions and loved ones captured in watercolour and ink. Sometimes I write. Sometimes I sit on the rear deck and cry as the swallows swoop and sway. 

I remember when I was young, sitting at my grandparents big old dinner table, with a coloured pencil drawing of a swan in my hand. My grandfather turned and said to me that I made drawings feel alive, and I'm doing my best every day to live up to that, believe it, and make it come true.

If you'd like to see what I've been making, you're very welcome to explore the gallery, or find out about commissions. And if you'd like a small piece of original art delivered to your door every month — painted here, from the boat, by me, and turned into a postcard — you can join my art subscription too.

Thank you for reading. Permission to come aboard!

Tracy xox