Biography
I have, from my childhood onwards, picked up beautiful 'things' and taken photographs wherever I go. In more recent years, with my son Andy's help, I have also discovered a love of working with green wood, enabling me to make a stool and two wonderful chairs under his guidance in his Devon woodland, Sallerton Wood. Nowadays, I am often to be found at one end of my greenhouse making lovely and useful hand-carved wooden spoons for the kitchen… sometimes using recently pruned wood from our fruit trees. I find this creative process absorbing, accessible and holistic! Involvement with craft, or indeed artistic activities of all sorts, has always been at the core of my life. I am also a keen gardener and make preserves from my home-grown fruit and vegetables.
My inspiration for painting is found largely in the details of the natural world perhaps due, at least in part, to having been trained as an ecologist and needing to look closely in order to first find and then identify organisms. I see abstract paintings just waiting to be realised on the pebbles or pieces of fallen rock that I pick up compulsively, both in Wales where I live now and on the Isle of Wight which I visit regularly with my husband Alan while he collects and studies fossil shells. It was whilst on the Isle of Wight that I really ‘got’ the painting bug; allowing myself to experiment with, develop and interpret those things that I find so intriguing and beautiful! Capturing as photographs the patterns made by moving water, reflections, or the plants within water, then translating them into paintings is another of my fascinations. At times I start to ‘see’ things (often animal forms) in my paintings and develop them in a surrealist way; diverging from my starting point but thoroughly enjoying the fun of that journey.
We moved to Penrhyncoch near Aberystwyth in 2010 after several decades of coming to the hills between Machynlleth and Llanidloes for family holidays. I have attended the Taliesin Art Group since we moved here and I was delighted to be invited to join the Mid-Wales art collective The Picturemakers / Y Llunwyr in 2012. My creative time is currently spent painting, drawing, doodling, making spoons from green wood, sculptures from driftwood and trying to capture the beauty of beach glass and pebbles in blocks of resin. I relish the opportunity to continue developing my painting; encouraged by my fellow Picturemakers and inspired by what I find or see wherever I go.