About me

I have been passionate about creativity since childhood. This has taken many forms over the years, dressmaking, patchwork, gardening and of course painting. After school I turned down my place to study art, I wasn’t sure I could earn a living through it! After 10 years whilst living in Birmingham I took A level art at Bournville School of Art and haven’t stopped painting since then.

Whilst working part time as a school secretary I painted regularly, mainly still life and flowers using watercolour which were very popular with customers. After retirement and moving to rural Worcestershire I was starting to struggle with such a transparent medium so returned to the versatility of acrylic paint. I had also lost interest in still life, and wasn’t sufficiently interested in representing landscapes, figures and faces held no excitement. My next challenge was semi abstraction, starting with boats and harbours. Later I became fascinated by the compositions of Diebenkorn, the structure and design of his work drew me but I moved on towards non objective art, that is not from the visual world around me. I learnt of artists whose interest was in the process of creating, not any form of using the observed, this led me to think about the elements of art, line, shape, texture etc to see where it led me. This has been the starting point of all of my recent paintings.

I still use acrylic but recently have discovered the versatility of collage, mainly using tissue I have painted myself. I love the opportunity to move them around my painting deciding on the very best placement. I begin intuitively using paint, crayons and other tools to start laying down colour, adding drawn marks, perhaps adding ink, pastel or collage. I have no idea where this will lead at this point but continue working until a design begins to suggest itself to me. When I’m nearing the end I slow down, giving time to consider and reflect, adding and refining until I am completely happy with the result.