I paint things which are important to me – here my garden and open studio door, celebrating four years of making the garden happen, and four years (five now!) of painting in the studio. I grew most of the prairie flowers from seed, and have a greenhouse full of tomatoes. Now the echinaceas and prairie mallows self-seed in a riotous pinky-purple chaos, buzzing with bees and a few butterflies flitting about. Also I have a thing about watering cans. You can see the influence of Paul Klee and Bonnard in this, even perhaps Matisse.

Other important things to paint/celebrate are the fact that I am still painting in my seventies with plenty to paint about, and friends who  share the same interests. I include my beautiful Galgo (Spanish sighthound) Bims and my ever-increasing stashes of books, my independent life as a woman, always able to be self-sufficient, the art-school education I was so lucky to have, the poetry writing I undertake for other people’s pleasure as well as my own, my daughter and her partner living close to me in Scotland.

I like painting myself dreaming on the sofa too. I paint my agency – put down often enough as a woman, not serious, courted by the imposter syndrome that comes knocking.

I am also interested in the stuff of paint itself, how it runs and flows, makes sedimentary layers, whether watercolour or oil or acrylic. My oil paintings are structured on a background of collage, sometimes visible, sometimes not, of playing with paint on a flat canvas, of letting wet paint, or solvent, flow down the painting, cutting through what is there already or adding layers. From this abstract beginning I can see how the painting will take me further into figuration, and the whole process can take months or years.

If you are interested in a painting, contact me through the form here on my website. (Please know that any requests for NFTs will be ignored and marked as spam)  Click on the ‘contact me for more information’ link in the menu.

 

 

Tell me you’ll come home (SOLD)

acrylic, paper collage, cold wax and oils on canvas, 2024, 120 x 100 cm.

Now in the collection of the School of Sport and Education, Moray House, Edinburgh University.