A Moment of Stillness
Every story begins with a feeling.
For me, Still Life began with stillness itself — that strange, suspended sensation of loving what you do yet feeling like time has stopped around you.
In 2022, I wrote a song called Still Life for Berried Alive. At the time, Charlie and I were pouring our entire hearts into music and art, working from home, creating endlessly — yet every day began to blend into the next. I felt both fulfilled and frozen. Like a painting on a wall, observing life instead of living it.
“And I don’t want to go outside / Cuz I don’t know if I’m real…”
— Still Life lyrics
That line captured exactly how I felt — adrift between motion and meaning. I started to imagine what that emotion might look like if it were a painting: quiet fruit resting in a bowl, light passing softly across glass — something beautiful, but unmoving.
From Digital Art to Pastel Dust
Because Berried Alive has always played with fruit as metaphor, I wanted to create a still life of fruit for the single art. But I didn’t yet know how to paint the way I envisioned. Until then, I had only worked digitally — in Illustrator, Photoshop, and Fresco — and I longed to feel pigment under my fingers.
That’s when I found Barbara Sheehan’s pastel classes at Vancouver Art Space. I began attending every week in early 2023 and instantly fell in love with the process. Pastel felt alive — tactile, direct, like playing bass guitar with my hands. There was no brush between me and the art, just color and touch.
I spent months studying, building confidence until I finally began my Still Life painting in November 2023. I bought an antique Carnival Glass bowl — I’ve always loved its iridescent, rainbow sheen — and arranged fruit on my dining table for reference. The wallpaper behind it? It was the Berried Alive Monogram Print, tying back to where the idea began. Later, I meticulously reworked it in Photoshop, transforming it into the House of Caswell monogram that now defines the collection.
“This still life’s leaving me confused / I let it happen, I stand accused…”
A Painting Becomes a Portal
I finished the painting in February 2024, had it framed, and hung it in my studio. It became both a mirror and a portal — a reminder of the moment I decided to evolve. Charlie and I chose Still Life as the title track for an upcoming 2026 album, using the original painting as its cover art.
From there, I began designing repeating prints inspired by the artwork. What started as a single image became a series of patterns, textures, and forms — a dialogue between painting and clothing. I developed them first in 2D, then in CLO3D, transforming brushstrokes into silhouettes.
At first, I didn’t plan to produce the garments. I was simply designing for the love of it — but the more I created, the more I realized I was building something new. I wanted to make clothing for women like me: creative, introspective, expressive, and drawn to luxury that feels emotional rather than excessive.
Where Still Life Led
That’s when House of Caswell was born.
It grew from that sense of stillness — a desire to turn stagnation into movement, introspection into art. Still Life became not just a song or a painting, but a bridge between worlds: from Berried Alive to House of Caswell, from music to fashion, from feeling stuck to starting anew.
“The paintbrush in my mind / Stays up sketching all my darkest fears…”
The painting now hangs in my studio, a quiet witness to the moment I chose transformation. It reminds me that stillness can be the beginning of movement — that even in the quietest seasons, creation can bloom.