Myriam Wares crafts a winter that looks nothing like winter in a surreal series about starting again in Italy

Moving to another country is a common theme of conversation amongst friends. We love to imagine what life might be like in warmer climes or more historic cities. Where you can sit outside, late at night, and enjoy dinner under the street lights, enjoying a warm breeze rather than endless drizzle or biting wind.

Some are already living the dream. Pals I met in Manchester (it's a very wet city) over a decade ago now live in LA, Sydney, Lisbon and Tokyo. Lucky them. But I do wonder if I could do it myself, given how much I love the UK. Brutal winters included.

It's why I was rather taken by Myriam Wares's latest series, Winter. It was inspired by her recent move from Montreal to Turin, driven by a desire to live close to the Alps. The French-Canadian illustrator swapped all that snow for a much warmer climate and, as you'd expect, it's taken a bit of adjustment.

It helps that she's fluent in French, English and Italian. She's also been freelancing for almost a decade, and her illustrations have been recognised by the Society of Illustrators, World Illustration Awards, Communication Arts, and 3x3. She's had a brilliant career so far. One she can clearly take anywhere.

So it's interesting that, despite speaking the language, she still felt out of sorts in a new country. She did what most of us would do in that situation: try to make sense of it. Myriam did so through her art. She called the series Winter to convey the mixed, complicated feelings of homesickness and not belonging. "Rather than depicting winter literally, the series grew out of the disorientation I felt moving halfway across the world," she explains, "where normally mundane things became strange and unfamiliar."

To make that happen, she "collected several elements from my everyday life in Italy to craft a surreal microcosm that follows its own internal logic and aesthetic". Those elements include giant clay pots, huge oranges and lemons, cypress trees and beautiful tiled floors. In each, the symbol of the sun.

The finished pieces look nothing like what we typically associate with winter. There's snow, yes. But only on half the compositions. You won't come across bleak landscapes or grey skies. This is Italy. Delivered with influences of symbolism, art history and traditional painting techniques. With the half-covered dusting of snow, it's hard not to read a feeling of being caught between two worlds. One foot in Canada, the other in Italy.

"This series lives amongst the many illustrations that form my surreal universe," she says. And looking through her portfolio, I'm charmed by Still Lives From Elsewhere, a diptych inspired by Italy, full of symbolism and surreal detail.

Perhaps there's a bigger lesson in Myriam's Winter series. That moving abroad doesn't just change your address; it changes how you see life in general. The mundane might seem strange and alien, but Myriam turned that feeling into something beautiful.

Does it make me want to join my happy (and warmer) friends, knowing autumn is only round the corner? Not quite. But one day, presumably, the giant lemons and tiled floors of Turin will feel as ordinary to Myriam as a Montreal snowstorm.

And when that happens, the Winter series will stand as a record of that odd, in-between sensation she once felt – the feeling that only comes when you leave your old life behind to embrace a new one. It takes time, but eventually you feel at home.