WHAT CAN I TELL YOU …. I journeyed with art in my pocket and my artistic mother on my shoulder as long as I can remember …..My childhood was spent on the North Cornish coast ….galloping along the sands and playing at Famous Five with my dog and best friend in the smugglers’ caves. Showing a talent for languages I moved to central London to do a degree followed by business studies. Meantime I started decorating friends’ flats with my paintings. In Chelsea I took up sculpting heads and doing pen and ink drawings of friends’ houses to order…..then together with my 7 year old son and dog, Welsh friends and I met up in Malvern. Offering us beauty, location and culture and a direct train to London I decided it was the the perfect move. I put my house on the market, upped sticks and left.. I was so delighted to find an Art College here which meant I could continue developing my art practice. Ten years on, during a 3 day visit to friends in the South of France, I had a coup de coeur and bought a fisherman’s dwelling in the old town of Cannes, next to the fruit and flower market …5 minutes walk to the Med……what a dream! With the wind in my hair and sun on my face the coastlines and interiors of Southern France and Italy gradually opened up to me over many road trips…..I was bathed in beauty, sun and warmth…..I paint now in my garden studio in Central England still amongst palm, olive and fig trees, far from the sea but those memories still heavily embossed on my visual brain..................................The day starts
…. and the old clothes go on…freedom to get stuck in!! My studio is a large garden shed with double doors flung open in the summer and a blow heater and lined ski boots on standby for the winter! It is my favourite place to be.
I started with figurative work which over time has loosened up and in some cases now reaches abstraction. I am not after a literal interpretation but search for significant aspects. I am on the hunt for the essence….the fire. I want to express my own style and not be bound by those chains of conformity and expectation
I work quickly and intuitively to get the first marks down. Everything is exciting to me …..the consistency of the acrylic paints, the flow of the inks, the different marks of crayons, sticks, and fingers. It is after this start that I make more considered strokes enjoying the frolicking of colour and texture….the enrichment that surprise and happy accidents bring…the disappearing, the RE-appearing……the introduction of interesting bits of paper/print, …. the laying on, the sanding off,… rotating the canvas…..the back and forth………the joy of a conversation with my work. ... I have exhibited with RBSA (commended), SWA London, Pre-selection for RSA Summer Exhibition and my paintings have flown away to offices homes and collections in the UK and abroad.