Black, white and the occasional navy once made up the colour palette of Lena Baumgartner’s working life, spent behind a screen in the aviation industry. These days, she’s surrounded by much more colour. After her first son was born in 2016, she began trading her former career for paint and canvas. Self-taught and led by instinct, the artist, now based on Kaurna Country in Adelaide, hasn’t looked back.

Her abstract paintings are big, expressive and gloriously untidy. Colour follows feeling: restless greens and blues, pinks crashing into muted neutrals and, closest to her heart, deep burgundy. For Lena, the daughter of Vietnamese migrants, that shade feels like being home in your pyjamas, surrounded by people who know you best – a hug from her mum or grandmother.

Growing up, Lena knew another colour palette: the spices, broths, and noodles of her grandmother’s kitchen. Cooking together meant hearing stories of Vietnam, and those memories still find their way into her work, not as literal images but as warmth, mood and emotion.

Now a full-time artist and mother of boys, Lena is happiest working on canvases larger than herself, where she can be bold and completely absorbed. Her darker, moodier paintings feel especially true to who she is. Reinvention may have brought her to painting, but it’s the freedom to feel everything that keeps her there.