Art With Heart
About
Hello, I’m Annie Frances, an Australian artist, singer, and roller-skating bird enthusiast.
I create artwork that celebrates movement, humour, and connection - paintings of birds who roll, glide, and dance their way through life on skates.
My art lives at the crossroads of imagination and nostalgia, inspired by the freedom of birds, the joy of roller skating, and the thrill of finding beauty in motion.
After performing around the world for more than two decades, my travels have shaped a love of diverse landscapes, wildlife, and cultures - threads that now find their way into every brushstroke.
🌴 Where it all began.
Childhood on roller-skates, and daydreams that never stopped rolling.
I was born in Cairns, but when I was just six months old our family moved to Guam, a tropical island that shaped my earliest sense of colour, sound, and flight.
The first flag I ever drew was American, which probably explains why that symbol of freedom and courage resurfaced years later in my eagle painting, In Quads We Trust.
When I was eight, we returned to Cairns, and later I moved to Sydney, where I finished school, left home young, and discovered another way to soar - through music!
🎤 Life at Sea.
Twenty-five years at sea, thousands of songs, and endless horizons.
After winning a few singing awards, I stepped onto a cruise ship in 2000 for what I thought would be a short adventure.
More than two decades later, I’m still performing internationally, bringing audiences to their feet with 60s, 70s, and 80s shows - each one a love letter to joy and nostalgia.
Somewhere between ports, I began carrying binoculars instead of souvenirs. Watching seabirds glide beside the ship and in port became my quiet ritual, connecting performance with peace and giving my creativity new wings.
🎨 A Serendipitous Beginning.
The café that changed everything.
I didn’t pick up a paintbrush until 2020.
I’d never owned a sketchbook or studied art, but by what felt like pure chance, a café owner saw one of my first pieces and invited me to hang ten paintings on her walls. It was one of those serendipitous moments that changes everything.
The paintings sold quickly, and that unexpected success set me on a new path - one that would eventually lead to painting birds on roller skates.
🪶 Roots and Inheritance.
Nanna’s painting - a reminder that creativity runs deep, carried gently from her hands to mine.
Art and birds have always flown quietly through my family story.
Grandad was an avid bird lover who, in the 1970s, recorded the songs of Australian birds on cassette tapes, naming nearly every species by ear.
Nanna became an artist in her seventies, a local legend whose colourful impasto paintings still appear in homes across Australia.
Finding her works years later feels like discovering small messages left behind. Reminders that it’s never too late to create.
✨ Murals that took flight.
The Helmeted Honeyeater - my first mural, painted for my aunt, a symbol of love, home, and hope.
Reference photo kindly provided by David Nice (Flickr).
As my artistic journey continued to unfold, it began to grow beyond the studio walls and into the world itself. My first outdoor mural was a deeply personal piece. I painted it for a beloved family member, featuring the endangered Helmeted Honeyeater, Victoria’s state bird, surrounded by the state’s native flowers.
Placed where it could be seen from her window each day, the mural became a symbol of connection, comfort, and hope. Since then, painting birds on public walls has become a way to share that same sense of beauty and awareness with others - brightening urban spaces while drawing attention to the fragile species that inspire my work.
🛼 Birds On Wheels
Birds of the Quads - a collision of feathers, humour and freedom.
In 2025, while developing a new 1980s-themed cruise show, I took up roller skating which is a childhood joy rekindled.
Around the same time, I designed a mural submission for a community library at Glen Davis, NSW, Australia, featuring animals reading books.
Those two worlds of storytelling and movement collided, and the idea for Birds of the Quads was born!
The series began with a bald eagle in a spread-eagle pose wearing USA-flag skates - a playful nod to both freedom and flight and my early beginnings.
Since then, more skating birds have joined the flock, each carrying humour, heart, and the reminder that balance, courage, and creativity are all part of the same dance.
💫 Today
A peek into my studio where puffins, paint, skate wheels get changed and plenty of ideas take flight.
I paint from my Sydney, Australia studio between travels, usually starting before sunrise - around 4:40 a.m. - when the world is still and the first birds begin to call.
Each bird I paint carries a little of my journey being Guam’s colour, Cairns’ light, Sydney’s rhythm, the oceans I’ve crossed, and the family legacy that still sings in the background.
Hidden within every piece is an easter egg. A subtle, often transparent image of an endangered bird connected to the main skater in the artwork.
In "In Quads We Trust", it’s the Guam Kingfisher, the bird of my earliest memories, faint and tiny, but hopeful.
In my Cairns mural, a faint 4.4 cm cassowary hides among the colour, almost invisible, just as the species has become in the wild.
Their transparency is deliberate: a quiet reminder that these birds are nearly gone, fading from view, yet through art their presence still endures.
If you’ve found your way here, welcome. You’re part of the flock now.
💌 Stay connected
Join my newsletter, The Flock, for member-only specials, stories, new artwork releases, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the Birds of the Quads series or simply to share your love of birds, skating, and joyful art.
🕊️ Love, wings and glitter wheels,
Annie Frances