Tirena Rollins has a special tonic for job stress — paint.

As a 911 dispatch supervisor, Sgt Rollins might deal with 20 to 30 emergency calls per day.

“The job is very exciting and interesting, but it can be very hard to leave it behind at the end of the day,” she said.

To relax, the 51-year-old often paints abstracts until the wee hours of the morning. She has a show, Exotic Images, on now at the Bermuda Society of Arts.

“People ask me what I am thinking when I am painting,” she said. “To be honest, I’m not thinking anything. You get into this zone where your mind is just blank. It is definitely therapeutic. I feel amazing when I do it.”

She doesn’t have a plan when she sits down to paint; she just picks up a brush and goes at the canvas with acrylic paint.

“It comes from my soul,” she said. “I don’t know what is going to come out until it is done.”

Her paintings are a mix of shapes and colours, and she is fascinated by the things people see in her work. In one painting different viewers have reported seeing an alligator, a dragon and a scary face coming up out of water.

“I never title my paintings,” she said. “I don’t want to influence what people see.”

Some people might think this is goof-proof art; Sgt Rollins sees errors even when no one else does.

“I will sometimes paint over a work and make it something else completely,” she said. “I have to feel my paintings. I know when they are how I want them.”

Recently, she’s started adding bits and pieces to give her paintings texture.

“I might use a bit of chicken wire,” she said. “For one piece in this show I tore off the baubles from a shirt that no longer fitted me.”

She admitted that sometimes, in a fit of enthusiasm, she has destroyed things that were still usable.

“With the shirt, I did think afterward that someone else could have used it,” she said, “but I really wanted the baubles.”

Her living room is stuffed with canvases, paint and other materials.

“I think I am the sort of artist that feeds off messiness,” she said. “My dream would be to one day build my own studio.”

Some of her work is on the walls of the court liaison department, where she previously worked.

“I brought some to show my colleagues, and there was such a positive reaction that I put them up on my office walls and in other parts of the department,” she said.

She entered the Bermuda Police Service in 1981, wanting to be an asset to the community. She’d always loved art, but never really took it seriously until 2000.

“I started out drawing cartoon characters,” said Sgt Rollins. “I had never had any interest in them, but I painted Snow White and some other characters as a mural on a friend’s wall. Eventually, I graduated to abstract art. I also write poems. I think the first abstract I did was probably to go with a poem I wrote. I don’t really know how the transition to abstracts came about. I think it was just the maturing of my art form.”

She had her first show in 2004 to celebrate her 40th birthday and raise money for charity.

“For a long time, I held off doing a show,” she said. “I felt confident about my art, but I was unsure how the general public would receive it. You don’t see a lot of abstract art on show in Bermuda.”

But she said people were supportive, and bought her work.

“The first one to sell was one I did of [the number] 69,” she said. “I was just so surprised and excited when it sold. I hadn’t expected that one in particular to sell. The ones that people like are never the ones you expect.”

At a police auction last year, eight of her pieces raised $1,300 for charity.

“That made me feel really proud,” she said.

Exotic Images is on now at the BSoA until August 5.