Member since Thursday 27th Oct, 2011
My interest in painting developed as a result of having to work from a design source to produce warps for the Bradford & Ilkley Diploma in Handloom Weaving (1988). As part of that, I delighted in colouring fleece with natural and artificial dyes, prior to spinning it into yarn for weaving and knitting.
Suddenly my passion was colour and light and struggling to master watercolour, moving on to experiment with encaustic wax, acrylics and most recently oil-painting, especially small pochades thanks to A&I's article (June 2009).
Although largely self-taught, I have attended a number of artist-lead workshops and courses. I am currently completing a Higher Cert. with the School of Education and Lifelong Learning through Aberystwyth University.
Now am I poised to bring to bear the vast resources brought to me through my studies of recent years. I must be in a different place from the one when, in 2006, I held a joint exhibition at Montgomery with my friend and fellow-painter, Ann Jeeves.
As a survivor of two major cancer treatments, I now plod through life rather than romp through it. But I am ever, I hope, open to new experience and edging a little closer to the truth of who I am, who we all are, and what life is all about. So I do a lot of reading, too, studying in particular A Course in Miracles. The imagery within this sometimes informs my work, in fact. I am coming to see the act of painting as an act of joining, a coming to myself within the other, be it person or object.
Of course, I often forget that and just paint!
And I often don't paint - I just think about painting!
