Not a place copied. A feeling captured.
Three years in the making. Original oil paintings created for Tesoro Island Resort, a private island seven miles off the coast of Hopkins, Belize. One animal, one feeling, one room at a time.
By dessert, we were buying an island.
In February 2022, I flew to Belize for an investor dinner. The plan was a boutique hotel on the coast of Hopkins. Twelve courses, a table full of friends who had spent all day in the Belizean sun, and a pitch deck that never made it out of the bag.
Somewhere deep into that long night, my husband, Matthew, said it: “What if we just bought an island?”
The table lit up. A few months later, our partners found one: Wee Wee Caye, a former marine research base seven miles offshore, with a reef wrapped around it and a mangrove forest protecting it from storms.
Our partners and I put together a group to buy it and build Tesoro Island Resort. My role became everything a guest would see: the brand, the guest experience, and every piece of art on the walls.
The brief was one word.
In October 2023, Matthew and I were standing in St. Thomas when the call came: we were closing on the island. I had been filling a sketchbook with parrots and sea turtles all week, so I asked our operations partner what he imagined the artwork would look like.
“Vibrant.”
“That’s it?” I asked. “Yeah. Vibrant.”
That was the entire creative brief for five themed cabanas, a honeymoon suite with its own private pier and plunge pool, a lobby, a restaurant and bar, a gym, a yoga studio, and every bathroom in between.
Honestly, it scared me. It didn’t feel like creative direction at all. But the deeper I went into the project, the more that one word turned into freedom. Nobody was going to hand me the vision. I got to decide what vibrant meant to me, and what Belize meant to me.
A painting should know where it lives.
I’d been trained to design artwork for a specific space. Size and orientation change how a room feels. The colors around a painting matter. Even the subjects speak: a pair carries intimacy and companionship, an odd number creates tension, and two figures turned toward each other tell a different story than two turned away.
I knew every question to ask before a brush touched canvas. I had one word to answer them with.
Something like this.
I first stepped onto Wee Wee Caye on March 2, 2024. I expected a postcard. What I found was a construction site: half-finished buildings, debris, the peculiar smell of the mangroves, and potential you had to work to see.
“This wall might move.” “This room will extend a few feet.” “We’re thinking the layout will be something like this.”
Something like this. I heard that phrase a lot. There were no blueprints and no final measurements, so I found a tape measure, photographed every wall, and wrote every dimension into my phone. I was painting for rooms that didn’t exist yet.
A method built from scratch, one bite at a time.
Back in my garage studio in the Arizona desert, in front of a massive easel Matthew built, I still didn’t know what to paint. So I built a method.
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01
Measured the walls
No blueprints existed. Tape measure on site, hundreds of photos, every dimension written by hand.
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02
Built mood boards
Pinterest, hotel art, resort listings, researched until the word “vibrant” had a shape.
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03
100 paintings in 3 days
Ten minutes each, momentum over clarity. Hibiscus, banana leaves and palms kept surfacing. So did whale sharks, nurse sharks and parrots, and above all, movement.
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04
One room at a time
The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. I started with the honeymoon suite.
Wrapped in something wild and warm.
The more time I spent in Belize, the more I understood the word. Vibrant was never a color. It was a feeling.
It was the jungle greens shifting from one hour to the next. The water turning from turquoise to indigo as the boat crossed from sand bank to open sea. The hibiscus open at first light and folded shut by evening. A place where the birds are part of the trees and the flowers are part of the light.
The palette was never planned: magenta, teal, deep green, every blue at once. The wildlife gives the collection its presence. The flowers give it movement. The color ties the whole island together.
The first painting was the hardest.
Not because of the brushwork. Because I didn’t know how to begin. I was standing in front of a blank canvas the size of an island.
So I asked one question about the honeymoon suite: what would two people want to feel, lying in bed, looking up at the wall? Connection. Romance. Love. I painted two birds wrapped in lush tropical foliage and called it Lovers Embrace.
It came out so alive that it wouldn’t stay in the honeymoon suite. It earned a cabana of its own, Parrots Paradise. The honeymoon suite needed something else: a guardian. The jaguar reigns over the Belizean jungle, so the suite became Jaguar’s Den, watched over by The Sacred Watcher.
That’s when I understood what this collection was. One animal. One feeling. One room at a time.
Every room has an animal.
Jaguar’s Den
Protection and strength, for the beginning of something new.
Parrots Paradise
Connection, and the rainforest brought indoors.
Toucan’s Terrace
Companionship and community, in full bloom.
Ray Hideaway
Flow and freedom, rays gliding through shifting light.
Gentle Giants
Serenity. Whale sharks drifting like constellations.
Dining Pavilion
Warmth. A life lived by the water.
Common spaces
Renewal. An accent through the shared spaces and bathrooms.
What the island kept asking for.
Even after the walls were full, the island kept asking for more. Five new paintings followed: a sailfish breaking the surface in Chasing the Horizon, the scarlet macaw of Red Bank Rising, two manatees in Tender Tides, Mango Season, and The Treasure Within.
Chasing the Horizon was the easiest painting of the whole collection. By then my hands knew this world, and the abstraction and texture just flowed.
The Treasure Within was the opposite. At 48 by 60 inches, it’s the largest painting in the collection, and the size and detail made it one of the hardest. It’s also the one I’m proudest of: a mermaid in a clam shell (the shell from the Tesoro logo), inspired by the island’s chef, who swears he once heard a mermaid call his name at night.
Sleeping under the whale sharks.
After three years of painting for walls I had never seen, I finally slept under the work. Christmas on the island, in Gentle Giants, beneath the whale sharks.
I slept fourteen hours. Then thirteen. Then twelve. My body finally felt safe enough to rest.
In the morning I walked the island with my coffee. Every painting hung exactly where my makeshift blueprints said it would. Those whale sharks bring me a calm I can’t fully explain, and Gentle Giants is still my favorite room on the island.
Made for an island. Made to be lived with.
A painting doesn’t just fill a wall. It changes the room. A quiet room starts to hum. A hallway becomes the moment that catches you every morning on your way to coffee.
Every painting in The Belize Collection comes three ways: the original, a hand-embellished limited edition of 25, and fine art prints.
Stay where the collection lives: tesoroislandresort.com