| I'm Brisbane born and no matter where I've lived or travelled, I always find my way back home.
I could always "draw", so as a child, my parents sent me off to the old Central Technical College in the city for art lessons. While the lecturer always complemented me on my sketching, she was very silent on my painting attempts which always resembled a multicoloured blob. My parents decided to stop wasting their money and sent me off to private lessons with the beautiful Mrs Davidson of Sherwood. My mind boggled with all the magical things she taught me. It was here that I developed my love of watercolour.
High school art classes followed, with lots of charcoal portraits to order to pay for my art addiction. My first job was as a medical photographer and illustrator. I got lots of practice drawing body parts.
Marriage and motherhood while still working fulltime followed, meaning I had little time to pursue artist activities and somewhere along the years I lost my creative self.
With the first covid lockdown, I was blessed to connect with Melbourne artist Shani Alexander. Shani created a sisterhood to meet together online for painting challenges to an accompanying soundtrack, every Saturday from 10am to 6pm . Our group of 40+ each week posted our progress every 2 hours, encouraged and nourished each other. My art journey suddenly reignited. I started off with watercolour again but soon tried acrylics; still not my favourite medium. James Brown taught me his Expresso Method (oils) to paint a portrait very successfully. I intend to investigate his method much more when I have time available.
Since this time I have taken every opportunity to participate in workshops with Marcel Desbiens of Bienarte, Tracy Saywell of Articci, and others. Marcel and Tracy introduced me to oils which quickly became my go to medium.
Just as we each have our own unique personality, we each have our own individual creative style. For me, its the beauty of the garden; big blousy blooms in glorious soft colour palettes. The garden for me represents the hours that my mother knelt over her flower bed as she grappled with her concerns and also, the beauty I saw from my office window when all I wanted to do was to escape and walk in the sunshine.
I have a passion currently (again) for watercolour. It just lends itself so beautifully to silky clear nuances of colour shifts that for me, are not able to be caught in any other medium.
Some of the lessons that I have learnt along the way are:
*Drawing and painting are two totally different skills
*So that medium doesn't interest you - try again
next year
*From Jamie, turn your work upside down so you
stop trying to put labels on everything and they
just become shapes
and in a similar vein
*"To see we must forget the name of the thing we're looking at." - Claude Monet (my hero)
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