About

I started out with drawing, and I’ve always been an artist. I trained in ceramics in Cornwall, I loved clay, it’s variety, and the technical challenges that came with it. In my first workshop in Bristol and then here in the Forest of Dean, I made large garden pots and sculpture for nearly twenty years.  Then I started painting. These days, I divide my time between gardening, painting, and running art classes and workshops at my Forest of Dean, garden Studio and at local venues.

I’ve always loved the names on paint tubes, Alizarin Crimson, burnt sienna, cerulean blue and vermillion. my paintings often start with colour, inspired by colour combinations of still life subjects.

The paintings and drawings are about beauty in everyday things, favourite china, shoes, cotton reels and cutlery, the memories and recollections that they spark. I love to focus in on the small things, buttons, pins, lettering, and imperfections, creases, chips and cracks.

I began collecting vintage clothing, from jumble sales, as an eccentric teenager in the late seventies. I love to paint dresses and jackets linking them with objects to tell stories about where a dress came from or what happened on a day it was worn. I love the way things wear, and the reasons why, a frayed cuff, a pulled thread,  a lost or missing buttons.

I work in both oils and watercolours, liking them both equally for their very different qualities, choosing the medium that seems to best suit the subject. I stretch my own canvases in a traditional way, using raw linen, zinc tacks and rabbit skin glue. My watercolours use the contrast of precise pencil drawing and a loose and fluid colour. I paint most days, often working on two or three pictures at a time, for variety, one standing up at an easel and another sitting down at my drawing board.

Originally from Bristol, I have lived in the Forest of Dean for almost thirty years, with potter, Nigel Lambert

My paintings and drawings have been selected five times for the Royal West of England Academy and I have work in public and private collections.

I sell work through exhibitions, mainly in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and the South West, and directly from my studio.