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, its 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 within 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 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 by her use of colour, with the high depth and contrast used by her to create pieces of photorealism. “It goes back to the origin of us going beyond the point of just looking at things through its internal use but instead looking at more as something we find aesthetic, the inherent beauty,” said Co-Owner of Black Door Art Gallery Justin Ewans.

However, Amber’s work becomes much more than that. It’s about capturing a moment in time. Creating an eternal life, Justin says. This resonated with a particular customer who saw Amber’s work when glimpsing at it through the windows in Black Door Gallery on the streets of Parnell. “Her husband had cancer, he had about two years to live the doctors expected. For her, she saw these as the beauty of life as we have it now and with the people around us we can really enjoy it while they are still here,” Justin said. “For her, it was the capturing of the moment and the beauty while we have it.”

Choosing the perfect picture to paint is a gut feeling for Amber a lot of the time.

“When I first started I would take physical photos, lay them out on the floor, walk out of the room and then walk back in really quickly. I’d have a quick glance at them and the one that grabbed my attention first is usually the one I painted. It had something, I didn’t know what it was but it had something that grabbed me more than others. It’s how I fluked it at the beginning,” Amber says. She takes a break from painting to zoom in on her computer screen to analyse her picture more, a particular leaf from a rose enveloping the whole screen.

Being an artist isn’t always easy though.

“There’s always a yummy part in every painting that you love, where it makes you go, “oh I absolutely nailed that bit”. But all paintings go through this stage half way through where you just go, “oh this is hard”, where it hasn’t got what you want. That’s the whole thing about being a professional, you have to work through that part to get to the other end,” she says, looking up with such intensity and fierceness in her eyes. “You get people who go “why don’t you just take a photo?”, I can take a photo but that’s not what it is about. It’s the fact that I have created that from nothing. That’s the challenge,” she says as she picks up her brush again and begins to paint once more, fully dedicating her attention again to the task at hand, this time moving onto the shadow of a particular petal.

Her paints are meticulously organised on her right side. Ergonomic she says. Yet piles of paper are left dishevelled and abandoned in the corner of the room, her desk buried under a sea of white.

Amber wanted to be an accountant at some stage but she couldn’t bare the thought to work in an office and deal with numbers every day. “It’s a much more forgiving lifestyle, you aren’t restricted and you don’t have to rely on going to work every day at a certain time but it takes a long time to make a living off art. There is a lot more to it. It’s like any other business where you have to manage it and promote it,” she laughs, grinning, the intensity from before vanishing. Her eyes slowly glance towards the pile of paper and snap back to her painting quickly, like the paper would bite her if she stared at it too long.

Amber hates paperwork, numbers and basically anything that has the potential of distracting her from painting. You wouldn’t think she would consider a career in teaching because of this. She didn’t either, she hated school. But now she teaches two days a week at Kumeu Art Centre, in a room filled with art easels, with women hustling and bustling around each other’s paintings, brushes in their hands and giggling over their gossip for the week.

For Lyn Catchpole, Amber’s art classes became more than learning about art. “I enjoy Amber’s classes for the social aspect as well as learning to use different media during painting classes. Of course, we have lots of fun as well. Our class is full of great, friendly people,” she says.

“Amber is a treasure. She is a very talented artist and we are always in awe of her works,” Lyn says. However, Amber has gained just as much as her students have. As well as painting things she would never paint, her classes become a break from the isolating nature of being an artist. “Art is insular and that’s why I teach. Everybody needs to go outside. As a woman we need to have 2000 words a day, so I get all my words out on a Wednesday, 10,000 words all on a Wednesday” she laughs. “For me it keeps me sane.”

But in the end, she may have recently sold a painting worth 11 thousand dollars, yet for Amber her biggest achievement is becoming more comfortable with herself. “For the first five years I couldn’t call myself an artist. I felt like a fraud when I first started painting,” she says. Now life for her as an artist is normal, but it’s still the little things that are important. “It’s still really exciting selling a painting. It never dulls,” she says, her eyes beaming with wrinkles around the corner, her face lit up in a toothy grin.” It validates what you do.”