Brought up in the Surrey countryside, I loved painting and as a child had a picture in the Mall Galleries London as part of the Laing Exhibition, my first ever sale!
I attended Brighton College of Education with Art as my main subject where I studied colour artists Patrick Heron(who I was privieged to interview) and Bridget Riley. I left teaching early and have been painting for the last ten years and exhibited in Rugby, Leicester,Kettering and with NOS at Lamport and Boughton House, and in private homes and Open Studios. Many of these paintings in acrylics are of the landscape and the colourful "patchwork land" around Northamptonshire and Rutland.
More recently I have been on a year's course at Newlyn School of Art where I have painted butterflies on copper. I have painted half a butterfly and then set the butterflies in small "museum boxes with a mirror so that you can see the whole butterfly displaying its wings.We long to see butterflies in this way, and the challenge from the art work is whether we want to just see them in museums or conserve their habitats and continue to enjoy their presence. There is a word "sehnsucht" that does not translate well but means a longing, a desire, a pull on the heart, and we feel this sadness when the environment is being spoiled, but we also have a positive longing to help restore it. It has been a joy for me to paint the Chequered Skipper butterfly which faced extincion in 1976 but has been successfully bred now in Fineshade Wood.
My landscapes showing bright fields remind us of the joy when we see a field lit up in the countryside, many of them the habitats of butterflies. "For now we see as in a glass darkly but then we shall see face to face" Many of the landscapes are on natural flax. I have exhibited at Tremenheere Scuplture Gardens in Cornwall as part of my course, and more recently in The Three Hares gallery in Olney with Teresa Williams, our exibition "Just before Midnight".
I am a member of KDAS, NOS, the National Trust and Butterfly Conservation.
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