About Me
I’m largely a self-taught artist. When my children were young I attended an evening class at Lichfield College and started to experiment with oils when and if time permitted. Over the past five years, I have been able to devote more time to my artistic career. I have held two solo exhibitions at the Brewhouse in Burton, been exhibited three times at the RBSA in Birmingham, selected as a finalist for the Broadway Arts Festival and the Arts Derbyshire Showcase at Masson Mill. Most recently my work ‘Seeking Sanctuary’ was highly commended at the Ashbourne Summer Festival and ‘Seeking Settlement’ was published in a New Zealand magazine concerned with social justice. I exhibit across the UK, including at the prestigious Wirksworth festival. I trained under award winning artist Martin Kinnear RCA completing a Diploma in Oil Painting at the Norfolk Painting School in 2022.
I am drawn to post impressionist art, particularly expressionism and cubism, and principally use line and colour to convey my relationship to my subjects. I tend to paint an experience, memory or from my inner world. I love the scope of oil paint to create textural effects and find that using brush and scrapers helps exploit that potential. I rarely paint using conventional perspective. I continue to experiment with the boundary between figurative work and abstraction.
Some of the modern day artists I admire include Francis Newton Souza, Frances Hodgkin, Leon Kossoff and the late Frank Auerbach, whose technique, use of colour and texture are a source of aspiration.
Associations
