Growing up in rural Aberdeenshire, some of my earliest memories are of the joy of drawing, putting to paper the things that excited, intrigued, beguiled and preoccupied me. The abundance of nature, dramatic weathers, wonderful landscapes and mystical stone circles that I grew up with have since shaped my understanding of my world and given form and direction to my inner emotional tides.  Later years, spent enjoying the contrasting pace of city life, left me longing for a return to green space and in the rolling vistas and vast skies of Oxfordshire I have found a new beloved aesthetic home.  

I am an artist because when I close my eyes at night I see my world in paint.  Even in creatively dormant years, this private artistic process was a constant. Having chosen to direct my passion for art into study of its history instead of into its practice, I spent many happy years working in the arts and antiques trade in London. Privileged by proximity to the finest artisanship, I was daily inspired and bewildered by its skill and beauty.  However, in retrospect I can see that such exposure had an unexpected effect on my own creative spirit. Gradually I lost the confidence that as a child allowed me to attempt to materialise my own artistic urges. Unused artistic muscles grew soft and unresponsive and, in moments when I did pick up a brush or a pencil, I was downhearted by my inability to represent the impulses of my mind with any iota of the skill I witnessed. So I stopped trying.  Thankfully my need to create continued to bubble away unfulfilled and, in motherhood, I rediscovered the courage and expressive freedom I had misplaced. Watching my children draw and create unabashed, free, expressive, relentless, inspired me to rediscover my own unparalleled joy in painting.  Creating art provides me with my essential sense of self.  As I continue to experiment and develop I am excited to see where my creative impulses will lead.

With varying degrees of realism and abstraction I work in a variety of mediums but favour oil paints. Surfaces vary in size and I find my self drawn to ever larger canvases. If this continues I will soon burst out of my small home studio, a chaotic jumble of a space squirrelled away from the main bustle of the house. Smaller wooden boards allow me to work up ideas and to work at pace in the moments I can snatch from family life. I love the way the way the paint spreads and scrapes over the firm wooden surface. I strive for bold draftsmanship and favour strong line and form and this underpins my aesthetic approach across a broad spectrum of subject matter. My use of colour is intuitive and often surprises me.  I relish the tactility of paint and revel in the expressive potential of texture and mark-making that it allows me to explore.  The act of painting feels at times like the scratching of an insatiable itch, my hand moving in strokes more instinctual than considered.