As a young woman, Julia Cairns imagined a life working with horses in Oxfordshire, England.

After finishing a year-long study of horse management, she and a friend decided to go traveling. They started in France picking grapes, and earned enough money to extend their journey to Kenya.

Once Cairns began drawing portraits of the Masai people at age 21, the course of her life was forever altered.

"I worked on a colonial ranch where the tourists would come and have tea ... And that's where I first started drawing Africans. I started drawing the Masai and selling my little sketches."

Cairns found a shop owner willing to sell her cards, and from there, her career as an artist took off. She traveled to other parts of Africa, and she began exhibiting her paintings and getting commissions for other work.

"I painted from my mokorro (dug-out canoe) in Botswana, as well as from the truck and often on foot," she said.

Cairns spent the next nine years honing her skills as a self-taught artist and learned to live off the land in the Okavango Swamps, which involved picking figs, catching fish and shooting pigeons. When she wasn't in her canoe, she painted on the sand banks and tiptoed around crocodiles. Later, she fell in love with American biologist John Bulger, whom she married before leaving Africa. They'd listen to the baboons screech in the night, and she was amazed as he identified individuals according to their vocalizations.

"I really got to know the baboons very well, because they all have names," she said.

It's no wonder that many years later at 50, Cairns' artistic consciousness still clings to Africa no matter where she lives.

In October, she and two other Britons — Shirley Lynn and her mother, Joyce — opened Bee's Knees Studio near The Tea House on Canyon Road. Cairns sells children's books about Africa that she illustrated, as well as prints, puzzles, note cards, counted cross-stitch patterns and original paintings in watercolor and acrylic. The other artists paint New Mexico and European scenes.

Cairns moved from a dreary island in British Columbia to a quiet dirt road in Eldorado with sweeping mountain views, tawny grasses and plenty of sunshine in July 2008. The light and the landscape of New Mexico have great appeal, and the adobe architecture reminds her of the house she built in Botswana using hand-hewn bricks.

"Everything just fell into place, so we came," Cairns said.

In her studio, Cairns sits in chair designed for the Santa Fe Opera and sips English tea.

"In everything they do, there's a rhythm and elegance," Cairns said of the African people. "There's nothing awkward about them."

Cairns is saddened that AIDS has ravaged the continent she loves, but she paints the "joyous side to Africa." She often pays tribute to African women, "because women are the ones who do most of the work, usually."

In one painting, Cairns depicts women in the doorways of their homes, going about their daily affairs with the door open. "I love that image," she said. "You don't see that here. People aren't hanging in their doorways connecting."

By now, Julia's whimsical images of Africa have spread all over the world. In Botswana, she was commissioned to paint flowers, grasses, orchids and climbing frogs for a series of postage stamps. She also was called upon to make a portrait of President Quett Masire, who posed near his lion-skin rug.

People who go on safaris still find her work in Africa. Quite popular is the bilingual children's book We All Went On Safari: A Counting Book Through Tanzania, which has been translated into numerous languages and won awards.

In California, Cairns sold her paintings at galleries in Davis and Santa Cruz. Later, her work reached the mass market on quilting fabric sold in Walmart, and her stylized Africans have appeared on handbags, coffee mugs, shower curtains and puzzles in other retail outlets.

"I had always drawn, and my father was an artist," she said. Cairns' father is a classically trained artist and an art historian. She didn't grow up with him, but she counts him as an influence, and he's come to Santa Fe to visit.

At the moment, Cairns is illustrating two books: The Girl Who Married a Ghost and Other Tales from Nigeria by Ifeoma Onyefulu and a collection of poems about the moon by Marilyn Singer. She laughed that she's painting white people for the first time in many years — and it hasn't been easy.

She never wanted to leave Africa, but her husband had to return to the United States to finish his studies. "After we married in '92, we came to the U.S., which was the big culture shock!" she said.

When she first moved to California, she painted stylized, joyful Africans to help get her through the culture shock, while her husband finished his degree and set out to protect red-legged frogs.

She planned to return to Africa to live, but it hasn't worked out yet. She dreams of taking her two children, 14-year-old Robin and 12-year-old Oliver, to Botswana before they leave home. But until that day, she keeps her connection to Africa alive with her paintbrush.

Inspired by the people, animals and plants of another continent, she finds what she needs to express her interior landscape. Cairns said when she flips through the "library of images" in her head, she doesn't know what's going to come out on the easel. Last year, when she was grieving the death of her mother, she painted a collage of huts, a Masai woman and a man. She called it Sorrow.

"When I sit down with a blank sheet of paper, I don't know what's going to come out, but a lot of the images are related to how I'm feeling or to a more universal subject," she said.

In New Mexico, Cairns has had the great delight of meeting other Brits. At Desert Academy, she befriended Shirley Lynn, whose daughter is in Robin's class. The two mothers discovered they have much in common: their homes in England were 10 miles apart, Cairns' mother and Lynn's father once worked in the same office, and both women have "huge feet" and love to paint.

On Friday, the Brits will be at their gallery for an open house, offering hot cider and featuring Robin Bulger (Cairns' daughter) on the fiddle.

Trained as an illustrator in England, Shirley Lynn finds a lot of her inspiration in New Mexico. Meanwhile, her mother, Joyce Lynn, paints outside wherever she goes, bringing back images from seascapes in Maui to villages in Tuscany. The longtime Tesuque resident has been selling her watercolor sketches and oil paintings off the easel, and this is the first time she has been part of a gallery. She studied Cezanne's use of color at the Ruskin School of Drawing at the University of Oxford after surviving a "grave" car accident that crushed her ribs.

"I just turned 80, so I'm a bit shy about coming out," Joyce Lynn said.

Contact Diana Del Mauro at dianadelmauro@gmail.com.