Dutch-born Meinke Flesseman’s skills as an artist have brought her wide acclaim in Portugal where her paintings of animals, landscapes, fat nude ladies and portraits have been eagerly received by gallery owners and art collectors.

Yet she is not an artist to rest on her laurels. There is always an underlying impulse to trust to intuition and explore new materials and techniques in an effort to break fresh ground in her work. Now, for the first time in her career, she has branched out into figurative sculpture, making Baroque style heads in white clay, some of which are glazed before firing in the kiln.

They are in marked contrast to her normal work though they could be seen as a natural progression in three dimensions from her superbly painted portraits. She said: “The idea was triggered by a desire to open up to the possibility of new things. It’s a different way of working and it’s really an experiment to see what comes out of it. I have always been drawn to creating things with my hands and relating to the alchemy of the material. I love that. The heads are straight from my imagination. Perhaps there is some kind of link to my portrait commissions. At the moment things are much in the early stages so I don’t know if it will release something inside me that can be rendered visible and meaningful in my art.”

Meanwhile, she is busy in her Algarve studio with other themes which currently include large paintings of people gathered at picnics and ad-lib preliminary studies on paper. Meinke’s artistic vision springs from a number of sources: the Algarve where she grew up; the Italian city of Florence where she learned the craft of jewellery; Moscow, where she painted alongside impoverished young Russian students and learned their language; and the sombre atmosphere of the academy in Amsterdam. Influences from this chequered background find their way into her work.

She was two years old when she came to the Algarve with her parents in the 1960s and grew up in “an idyllic Bohemian environment” in which she developed a love of animals. At 14, she started out on a journey in life which proved to be a big detour in her quest for artistic identity. After a spell in Holland and then further schooling in England she went back-packing for two years in the Far East. Back in Holland with money saved, she headed for Italy and Florence where she studied jewellery and attended painting classes. Later, in Portugal, she married and moved to Moscow with her now ex-husband and this proved pivotal to her artistic development. She found a small art school in Moscow attended by passionate and dedicated students who had a strong reaction against traditional painting. “They were very bold and intuitive with their colours and took a lot of chances with formal distortions to achieve expressive power and this was very different to what I was later taught in the academy,” she said. As opposed to the electrically charged atmosphere of the Moscow school, the Amsterdam college instilled in her the rigid, academic disciplines of drawing and painting.

This fusion of experience, the counterpoint of intuition and intellect, is much evident in her work. Carefully observed human figures and animals are depicted on layered textured canvasses of which the surface is animated by collaged fragments of gold leaf –perhaps echoing Russian icons – or glued paper. This technique is perhaps at its best in the Alentejo landscapes which seem to breathe fire, wind and rain and are bathed in a magical light. The animal and figure paintings communicate a deep affection for the subject and, at times, a touch of humour.

Since 1990 Meinke, aged 41, has had 30 exhibitions in the UK, Russia and Portugal including the galleries of Arte Algarve.