Some series arrive fully formed. This one arrived as a feeling I wanted to capture.
The Mediterranean Table began not with a sketch or a plan but with a kind of homesickness I couldn't quite name. It was a longing for the particular warmth of a Maltese kitchen, the abundance of a table that always had room for one more, the way food in Mediterranean culture is never just food. It is memory. It is identity. It is love and connection made edible.
I am Malta born and Melbourne made. I have lived in Australia for most of my adult life and I love it deeply. Its light. Its landscape. Its particular wild beauty. But Malta lives in me in a way that geography cannot touch. The Mediterranean Table was my attempt to paint that.
Here is the story behind every piece.
The Blue Set
Blood Oranges
Blood oranges originate from Malta, a delicacy even French Nobility went out of their way to precure. Rich crimson flesh beneath ordinary skin. A fruit that hides its most beautiful self until you cut it open. I painted them against a fresh turquoise background that felt like a clear Mediterranean summer sky. For me, it's the colour of possibility and joy, of looking out toward the sea and feeling an adventure ahead of you.
Figs
The fig is one of the oldest cultivated fruits in the world and one of the most quietly extraordinary. In Malta, fig trees grow wild and with a kind of casual abundance that the rest of the world has to pay for. The pleasure of this fruit is something I look forward to every summer—the way the skin gives, the delicate sweetness that hints at vanilla. I painted figs because they feel ancient and generous simultaneously. Against that turquoise background the fleshy insides glow like jewels someone left behind.
Pomegranates
The pomegranate is the most symbolic fruit I know. Across the Mediterranean — in Greek mythology, in Maltese culture, in the visual language of a dozen civilisations — it represents abundance, fertility, the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary. Split open, it reveals hundreds of seeds, each one catching the light like a tiny ruby. I wanted to paint that moment of revelation. That sense of more than you expected hiding inside something you almost walked past.
Lemons
The lemon is the Mediterranean in a single fruit. Bright, generous, essential. It goes on everything, it grows everywhere, it makes every table feel more alive and heals us when we are unwell. In Malta lemons grow in courtyards and on terraced hillsides and in pots beside front doors. They are not decorative. They are used. That is what I love about them. A lemon tree is life made visible, beauty and nourishment existing in the same breath. I painted lemons against that turquoise sky because they belong there — vivid and unapologetic and completely themselves.
The Dark Set
When I began The Dark Set I wanted to go somewhere more dramatic — a midnight background of phthalo blue and black with gold edging on every focal subject. I wanted the paintings to feel luminous, as though the objects were lit from within. A dark set about the Mediterranean felt honest to me. There is a nocturnal quality to Mediterranean life, with long dinners that begin after the daytime summer heat has fade, the particular beauty of candlelight on a table, the way the Mediterranean Sea glitters at night. The Dark Set lives there.
Oyster
An oyster is one of the most extraordinary things the sea produces. A creature that makes a pearl out of irritation. That transforms difficulty into beauty. I painted a single oyster with its pearl visible. A small, luminous miracle against the midnight background. For me the oyster is about what is hidden, what takes time, what rewards patience.
Garlic
Growing garlic in Malta and hung it to dry is a honoured tradition — braided and fragrant and completely at home in a Mediterranean kitchen. I do the same in my Melbourne garden now, with the sage and the herbs I grow alongside my painting practice. This braid of garlic is as much about my heritage as it is about the ingredient. It is about the things we inherit without meaning to. The rituals that travel across oceans and generations and quietly become our own.
Sardines
Fish has been the lifeblood of Mediterranean communities for millennia. Surrounded by sea, coastal villages built entire cultures around the daily catch. Fish was not a luxury but a lifeline, freely given by the sea when food on land was short and shared at the table without ceremony. I painted three sardines on a plate surrounded by lemon and thyme because this image is so simply and purely Mediterranean. No pretension. Just food and sea and the particular pleasure of eating something honest.
Honey and Oil
This is the most Maltese painting in the series. Honey, olives, olive oil, creamy feta (admittedly Greek), and Galletti — Malta's beloved traditional crackers — arranged together as a tablescape. The connection between Malta and honey runs deeper than most people know. The very name Malta is believed to derive from the ancient Greek word for honey. And Ħobż Biż-Żejt — the traditional Maltese sandwich of crusty bread rubbed with tomato paste, drizzled with olive oil, and layered with tuna and capers — is something I grew up eating and something my own children now eat. A small thread of memory passed from one generation to the next, from Malta to Melbourne.
The Pink Set
The Pink Set arrived with joyful abandon, unapologetically colourful with a warm magenta and orange background that felt like the pink of a Mediterranean sunset.
Tomatoes
In Malta the summer tomato is not simply an ingredient. It is a ritual. Grown in abundance under the fierce Mediterranean sun, tomatoes are preserved at the end of each season — slow cooked into rich pastes and sauces that carry the warmth of summer through the cooler months. At the heart of Kapunata, Malta's beloved cold summer dish, the tomato sits alongside capsicum, capers, and olives in a celebration of everything the season offers.
Sage
Sage grows in my Melbourne garden. I hang it to dry the same way my father hung his chillis in Malta and then in Australia also. Some rituals travel without explanation. This painting is as much about that continuity of tradition as it is about the herb itself. The way a garden connects you to the people and places that shaped you, across distances that have no business being bridgeable.
Capsicums
Red, yellow, golden capsicums with chillis and garlic — the essential ingredients of Kapunata, the dish that is summer in Malta. There is something quietly defiant about continuing and sharing these small practices in a country on the other side of the world, and we are all richer for it!
Olives
An olive branch heavy with golden, red, and black olives against that warm magenta and orange background. The olive has sustained Mediterranean life for six thousand years — pressed into oil, eaten with bread, fought over by children at almost every meal. In Malta olives appear in Ħobż Biż-Żejt alongside tomato paste and canned tuna. At times, I pack this in my children's lunch now. They don't know they are eating something ancient. They just know they love it (who doesn't?). That is enough.
Why I Made This Series
I made The Mediterranean Table because I needed to. Because there is a particular kind of adoration that comes from loving a place you no longer live in, and painting is how I process the things I cannot say any other way.
But I also made it because I believe these subjects deserve to be celebrated. Shared. The food of the Mediterranean is not just food — it is culture, memory, myth, history, survival, abundance, and love. And I wanted the people who bring these paintings into their homes to feel some of that. To sit at their dining table with Blood Oranges or Sardines on the wall and feel, however briefly, like they are somewhere warm and generous and alive.
That is what this series is for.
The Mediterranean Table is available as original acrylic paintings on 210gsm cotton rag paper and as fine art prints on archival cotton rag paper from $75. Browse the full collection on this website.
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