I will be exhibiting as part of wocART which is, this year, celebrating its 21st anniversary of participating in Artweeks at the West Oxford Community Centre.
To mark the occasion, we have invited back all the artists we could contact who have shown their work with us over the years. There will be a fantastic 24 of us in total, showing: basketry, ceramics, collage, digital art, jewellery, mixed media, painting, photography, prints, sculpture, textiles and more. I hope you can come along and enjoy our work.
I am still deciding which work to include but I will be looking back at earlier work as well as forward to new. My focus is likely to be on the personal , continuing my recent exploration of the experiences that have formed me, and on the human form. I have been doing more life drawing recently and hope to include some actual life drawing as well as work developed from it. I will be adding images of this as we get nearer to Artweeks so do please keep checking the website.
As well as exhibiting at the West Oxford Community Centre, I will also be showing some life drawing at the Louie Memorial Pavilion (site 407) as part of the Botley Drawing Group. There should be a really interesting range of work on display so please come along (it is open on 20/21 and 27/28/29 May).
As an artist, I am largely self-taught: I took Art A-level but then read Classics at university rather than going to Art school. I have drawn and painted throughout my life but much more so since my return to Oxford to live in 1998. I love trying to capture people in action or engrossed in activity but I can be inspired by anything I see around me, particularly if it involves powerful forms, strong light and shade or strong emotions. Most of what I produce is representational: I like how the world around me looks too much to let go of it very often.
The focus of a lot of my recent work has been on the idea of "identity", using my love of ancient Greek sculpture and art as a framework for this and drawing on Greek statuary and myth to help me express ideas about personal identity and personal experience. I am continuing to work on this theme alongside other interests.
I have very much enjoyed renewing my interest in drawing over the past year and will be showing some of yy latest work in this year's West Oxford Christmas Arts and Crafts Market (2 and 3 December at the West Oxford Community Centre) and during Artweeks 2024.
For my life drawing I have been using graphite, chalk, charcoal and pastel but have also increasingly been experimenting with collage as well and have really enjoyed the way this encourages me to work with more freedom. Generally, I work mainly in pastel, acrylic paint and collage: I prepare my own collage papers using acrylic paints, often recycling newspapers, tissue paper from purchases or scraps of art papers, to give myself different textures of paper and a subtle range of colours, which I know will stay true over time, to work with.