“It’s a visual feast,” she muses, “I love it all, and I don’t want to limit myself to any one aspect of it.” Working primarily in oils, many of her paintings capture the profusion of nature – dense forests teeming with life, bright sunlight illuminating the vivid foliage – and the islands’ myriad beaches. Some feature children playing in the surf, while others capture a solitary stroll on a deserted shore.

But for Reed, inspiration is everywhere.

As a foreigner living in Barbados, she sees her artwork as anthropological: she is the participant observer in a culture and environment that is not her own and thus approaches it from her perspective. Everyday scenes, such as a man in the shadow of a rum shop, where fierce sunshine hits a brightly coloured wall, or a lady standing quietly on a country lane, are just as inspiring as the soft light of sunset when the air is laden with Sahara dust.

Whatever the subject, for the British-born artist, painting is a form of meditation. When she is painting, she can easily block out the noises and activity around her. She began this practice when she was 14, after her father passed away, and, she says, it became a refuge, a place of solace she could escape to.

Around this time, she was introduced to the Caribbean, in all its colour and vibrancy, on a holiday to St Lucia. The trip, intended to ease the grief, had a profound effect on her. “Maybe it was the landscape, the people, or the timing, but on returning to England, I painted Caribbean scenes from memory and bought reggae albums from the local music store with no clue as to who the artists were,” she recalls. “Looking back, even before this, my favourite movies and stories were always linked to tropical islands.”

Back home in Cornwall, England, she completed an art foundation course and embarked on a degree course at Middlesex University. However, she dropped out after a year and moved to Bathsheba, on the east coast of Barbados. She has not stopped painting since then.

These days, to combat the feast-or-famine cycle that so many artists face, she spends the mornings baking cakes and making deserts for the restaurant in the botanical gardens and the afternoons painting in the onsite studio or at home in her kitchen.

She may have several paintings on the go at any one time, some small, others large. Some, she says, are snapshots of everyday life; others are narrative. The subjects are chosen intuitively, sometimes painted from a photograph, sometimes pieced together mentally from different sources. Her style can be either bold, painted in strong colours with contrasting light and shadow, or softer, painted in more pastel tones that are layered and brushed down.

But it is in her reflections on water – whether in the shallow pools left by the ebbing tide or the still waters of a sheltered bay – that her technical mastery shines through.

“Reflections are one of the hardest things to paint,” she agrees. “It makes you look, and look, and look, because of the layers in the water - you’ve got the colours on the surface, but also the shapes of what lies beneath.”

Ten years ago, Reed returned to England to pursue an art degree once again. A well-established artist by then – she had exhibited at galleries across the UK, in Antigua and Barbados, and sold many pieces online – she didn’t go for instruction in how to paint or draw. Rather, she says, "I wanted time to be able to explore painting, without the pressure of doing it for money, and to paint without feeling obliged to draw what I knew would sell.”

Perhaps the greatest revelation was that painting did not have to be difficult. “I always used to think painting had to be hard to be good. I couldn’t understand that something could be good if it were easy to do.”

Easy or not, Reed’s brush strokes express a fascination with both the natural world and the culture that surrounds her. In her quest to indulge in this curious, colourful visual feast, she is, in turn, creating an artistic banquet of her own so that others may enjoy the wonders of her island home through her work.