From an early age being able to draw and paint has always been central to my existence. I found solace aged ten years old and sent away from home, to that unheated post war boarding school, by copying the black and white reproductions of old masters that I found in the library. I particularly loved Botticelli‘s birth of Venus and I still see that tilt of her head in many of my works today. Punishments consisted of lines copied from the Greek classics and since I was frequently in trouble. I had a wonderful grounding in myths and legends. The two elderly ladies who ran this largely unregulated prep school for girls, passed on their excellent Girton education to us. Nothing was edited or dumbed down. We learned Shakespeare by heart and performed it in the garden. I played Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and learned about love and romance.
We were obliged to play snowballs in Aertex shirt’s when it snowed and went swimming in the sea after dark as a treat. Used to the tropics I got ill immediately. Ofstead would not have approved, and yet it was an education in the true sense of the word and still informs my work today.
I fretted at my next school and left at sixteen as I had been accepted by St Martin’s School of Art in London. Here I largely wasted my time and opportunities, marrying at eighteen, only to divorce after twenty or so tempestuous difficult years.
So today all these life experiences, the loves, the losses, the excitements, the sadness and of course motherhood all have all had part to play in the work I create. My feelings of empathy are personal.
I have learned to have no exact plans while making a painting, and let the painting lead me where it wants to go. I have learned to disregard the expectations of the art world, or galleries, and stick to the truth of what that particular painting IS. Like giving birth, there is suddenly something actually living, that wasn’t there before. No wonder I am compelled to work every day, driven by the excitement of it all.
I have also learned that accomplishment in itself is not art, and sometimes go out of my way to negate my facility for drawing by using distressed or difficult surfaces to work on, or by destroying a painting with random splashes of paint or ink, in order to breathe life into it.
After all these years I am still on a journey, still looking to make something, without any template or instructions, still searching for the undefinable. I feel fortunate to have found the comfort of reaching out with a visual expression that I can share, and which sometimes smiles back at me.
