For over 20 years, Jamaica-born Sabrina Adewumi chased engineering, technology, and interior- design project deadlines. Now, she is an abstract artist in her Southern California studio, finding vivid expression in colour, canvas, and the memory of home.

The first painting Sabrina Adewumi ever framed was a birthday present for her mother. She was a final-year chemical and process engineering student at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus in Trinidad, when the idea came. Rather than buying, she would make a gift for her mom. She walked into a local art store, purchased a few tubes of acrylic paint and got to work. Decades later, that canvas still hangs on a wall in her family’s home in Jamaica.

It is a fitting context to frame an artist whose career has been anything but linear. From the centenary St Andrew High School for Girls and GCE O-Level art classes at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, to grad school at George Washington University, and now to gallery walls in Orange County, California, Sabrina has spent her life balancing the rigour of science and the freedom of colour. She is, unmistakably, a child of the Caribbean, a region known for its vibrancy and cultural energy. With recent works on display in several Southern California exhibitions and a fresh body of mixed-media paintings taking shape, she is, by her own quiet admission, finally feeling the momentum.