Larussy Romero felt an earthquake for the first time while studying in Jakarta, Indonesia, as a foreign exchange student.

“It was 2018, and I was in class when everything began to shake,” the 24-year-old said. “It was caused by the eruption of a volcano many miles away.”

Her classmates panicked, but calm washed over her.

“I felt this peace, and thought, God is with us,” she said.

All these years later, she channelled that experience into Eruption, one of 41 resin and acrylic pieces in her show Universe Summer Collection, on now at the Bermuda Society of Arts at City Hall in Hamilton.

The Universe Summer Collection, her first art show, is an exploration of her Christian faith and the wonders of existence.

Each piece is an invitation to delve into the infinite beauty and complexity of the universe.

Ms Romero started doing art two years ago as a way to relax after a long day working as a brokerage assistant.

She started by doing faces. “I had no expectations when I started creating,” she said. “I started doing cartoons and then moved to using paint.”

One day her younger sister suggested she look at a TikTok video of people using resin to make their names.

“She said, you could do that,” Ms Romero said. “They would take an ‘L’ for example, put resin over it and put a flower in it. I said let me see how this looks with my paints.”

When she tried it, she loved the impact of the resin on the acrylic.

“It is like a mirror, so it literally reflects what is around you,” she said. “I have learnt to do it through YouTube videos.”

She calls herself a fluid abstract artist.

The resin has to be heated to a liquid consistency and then poured over the art. As it cools it hardens to form a thick, glossy coating. Resin pouring is not always an easy technique to achieve.

If you pour the resin on the art when it is too hot it will burn the paint underneath. You also have to use just the right amount of resin. She has learnt a lot through trial and error.

“I was trying to achieve a certain texture for a client and it was not coming out,” Ms Romero said. “Then I realised I was being too cheap and not using enough resin. As soon as I added more resin, it came out perfectly.”

The resin tends to combines with the paint underneath to form an abstract design, but it is almost impossible to control the resulting design.

“You do not know how it will look until you have a finished product,” she said. “I have to let God be God.”

Her faith is the engine that drives her art. Shortly before her show opened on Friday, Ms Romero said it was amazing to see the work on the wall of the gallery.

“It is exciting, but not unnerving, because God is in the mix,” she said. “I have nothing to be nervous about. I knew he was praising every piece I was touching.”

She hopes that others will also see God through her work. One of her favourite pieces in the show is Inner Peace.

“It does not matter how much money you have, if you don’t have peace you don’t have much,” she said.

Ms Romero loved art classes in school but does not regret going into finance.

“I have a passion for insurance brokering and negotiation,” she said. “I never knew that I could do art as well until this point. This is just something new to me.”

She started selling her resin art almost as soon as she started making it.

“When I first started, I just created to create,” she said. “But then, after I had three pieces, I thought I should put them up for sale on Facebook. I didn’t know if anyone would buy them, but I thought I would give it a try.”

A lady approached her to say she loved her work, and asked to see more.

“My heart was beating so hard,” Ms Romero said. “I was worried that the pieces did not look as good in person as they did in photographs. I did not know what other people would think of them.”

Not only did her first customer love them, she commissioned Ms Romero to do a larger piece. “I thought, maybe I am not so bad,” Ms Romero said.

From that point on, Ms Romero has continued to sell her work through Instagram and now a website. She hopes to begin selling internationally.

The most challenging thing about her art is just coming up with names for her pieces. For this, she has sometimes turned to social media for suggestions.

“People have been very positive,” she said. “People on Instagram came up with names for two of the pieces in the show Hourly Essence and Cherry Blossom.”

Ms Romero was born in the Dominican Republic, but came to Bermuda when she was nine with her mother, stepfather and younger sister.

“When I came here I did not speak any English,” she said. “Now I speak three languages.”

Also on now in the BSoA’s Studio A & B, is Lance Tucker Jr’s second solo show of mixed media art, DNA Discovery, and in the Onions Gallery Zina Edwards’ Unruly.

All exhibitions opened on Friday and run until August 16. For more information, see Ms Romero’s website.