Parenthood changes everything. Just ask Heather Everett.

Ten years ago, Everett was a high-powered executive for Chanel in Boca Raton. When daughter Hannah was born, however, the corporate world lost a valuable member.

"When the three-month maternity leave window closed and I had to go back to work, I just couldn't do it," Everett says.

At a friend's home about a month later, Everett joined in a game in which participants were challenged to paint an emotion. To her surprise, she was a natural. Everett took up the brush that evening and has never let it go.

Becoming an artist was an unlikely career change.

"I had never painted or taken a class," she says. "I didn't know how to use paints. Nobody could have told me that I would ever be an artist. It was the most bizarre and the most wonderful thing that happened to me."

To help learn the mechanics of art, she took a basic painting class at the South Florida Art Center in Miami Beach. That was all the talented Everett needed for a kick start.

Friends started asking her to do work for them, and by 1998 she had gone pro, exhibiting in the Miami Beach area and even Paris, where she moved in 2000.

"Days after we moved to Paris I met a woman who had a gallery. I painted with them for a month, and then had an opening exhibition for a month," she says. "The exhibition was at Atelier Artmonique."

Everett's family then took off to another part of Paris, one block from Luxembourg Gardens. Much of her time there was spent in the park and painting on her own.

The artist settled in Brevard County in 2003. A couple of art festivals in the area cemented her popularity locally.

In 2005, she opened the Heather Everett Studio and Gallery in Indian Harbour Beach. But after a couple of years teaching adults and children, she felt she needed to concentrate on her own art.

"Once I started teaching, it became harder for me to paint, so I decided to move everything back home," she says.

Still, she keeps her hand in teaching by leading classes at Indian Harbour Montessori School and at the Satellite Beach Community Center.

Everett has gained a reputation for her large, richlyhued acrylic works, painted in a style she describes as "radically simplified chromatic abstraction."

Palm trees figure prominently in her paintings, shimmering through Everett's generous use of metallic paints, which imbue her work with a sophisticated glow.

"I go for the palms because my surroundings are so important to me," Everett says. "I went back to South Dakota and painted there for a month and I found that my work was changing. It's a different feel there - lots of russets in the landscape."

Multiple layers of paint - slathered, sprayed or dripped - give a sense of tactile immediacy to her works, tempting viewers to touch the luminous surfaces.

"I like the rich colors," says the Satellite Beach artist. "Unfortunately, they're the ones that cost $25 a tube."

The backgrounds come first to set the tone and establish the setting. "For me, the background is very important," she adds.

Sometimes, the background becomes the painting, as it did with the abstract "Reflection Pool." "I couldn't bear to cover it up."

Everett couldn't part with it either, so now the massive painting hangs in her living room, a vision of swirls and undulations that lives up to its promise of contemplative opportunities.

While acrylics are her media of choice, the artist began her foray into the world of art by way of oil painting. "I didn't know there was anything else," she says.

But when she tried acrylics, it proved heavenly. "I love instant gratification, and acrylics allow that."

With two young children and teaching jobs, time is precious for Everett, and acrylics allow her the freedom to work in segmented periods.

"I work in blocks of two to three hours at a time because I usually don't have any more time," she says. "I love that you can put a layer on a painting and then go on to another. I usually work on three paintings at once."

Everett is a firm believer in the power of three. "I buy canvases in threes and also do a lot of triptychs," she says. "I like to power paint, that is, dig into three at a time painting backgrounds, and then experiment on each one combining favorite techniques with stabs at new techniques, and trade what I've learned from one to another."

For the artist, the creative process is as effortless as a sea breeze.

"I work very loosely and fast, because everything I do, I do fast," she says. "If I get to a point in a painting where I don't know where to go, I just put it aside for a couple of months."

The artist's bright disposition easily transfers into her works, making them spellbinding for collectors such as children's book author Mara Hixon, who admits she usually gravitates toward 18th-century maritime art.

Everett's lush painting of palm trees and flowers hangs among the subdued historical works in Hixon's Melbourne Beach home, and stands out like an Amazon parrot surrounded by mourning doves.

"A lot of paintings are very flat, but Heather's art is very textured," Hixon says.

Two of Everett's paintings hang at Ray Feapherhoff's Doubles Beachside Restaurant in Indian Harbour Beach.

"She paints the scenery I enjoy," says Feapherhoff, adding: "Not only is she a beautiful person, but she does beautiful work. Once you meet her, you gotta love her."

Everett's style even attracts people who don't consider themselves aficionados of abstract art.

"Most of the stuff in my house is figurative art, but every time I get a few dollars, I want to spend them on one of Heather's paintings," says Jackie Scone, who owns five Everett originals and two prints.

Scone is entranced by the artist's use of color.

"I'm a color freak, and everything she does is so rich," she adds. "A palm tree is a palm tree is a palm tree, except that Heather's are different. Her artwork is truly unique. It evolves out of who she is."