This year I'm delighted to be exhibiting my work at The Cube, Arts and Community Centre in the heart of great Malvern. A vibrant and welcoming venue with a great cafe serving a range of tasty, home cooked snacks, lunches, drinks, cakes and ice cream.

My passion for painting and my love of nature are intimately connected. I love to get out into the landscape in all weathers and soak up the sights, sounds and atmosphere of the natural world. I am particularly inspired by the light, colours, textures and patterns of the Malvern Hills. I paint mainly from my home studio using the sketches and photographs that I gather in my frequent walks there. Each painting is an individual voyage of discovery for me and I try to see my surroundings in fresh way, to evoke a sense of character in the landscape and express the wonder I experience in the everyday.

Sometimes my work has an otherworldly realism, other times my landscapes are abstracted through colour, form and texture. I try to bring energy, movement and drama into my work through a vigorous painting process: by building up layers of paint using brushes, palette knifes, spattering, rubbing back, scratching and scraping away to create a texted surface with depth and history. My experimental approach aims to find the sweet-spot between chaos and control, where mistakes become discoveries and a painting emerges from creative play.

This experimental approach and passion for colour, texture and composition is also evident in my purely abstract paintings. When painting abstracts I often work in an intuitive and gestural way, unearthing and burying marks, colours and textures, revealing glimpses of hidden colours in a highly layered surface that often incorporates elements of collage and printing.

With a Drama degree from Bristol Uni, and a previous career as a Bristol television editor making natural history programmes for BBC, my route to becoming a fine artist is an unconventional one. Re-discovering my love of fine art about 17 years ago (via a stained-glass making) I re-trained at the Bristol School of Art and then spent 10 years as an Art Teacher after moving to Malvern in 2008. Now I am finally living the artist dream, and I split my time between painting and art tuition.