I see myself as a beginner-dabbler who manages to spread herself thinly across several different media including drawing, watercolour, printmaking, ceramics, photography, oils, and acrylics. I hope to become more focused and to develop my capacities in fewer media but so far this hasn’t happened.
My subject matter includes the Blue Mountains’ escarpments, skies and trees (in oils, watercolour, photography and print), portraits of humans and animals (in drawing, painting, printmaking) as well as functional ware and small figures which I call “cross species creatures” (in ceramics). I am also influenced by Japanese things, due to long-standing connections with that country (in watercolour, ceramics, photography). Most of my work is representational. I work en plein air, from life and from photos I’ve taken.
I had art around me as a child. I was sent for drawing lessons where I copied line drawings from a book. My mother kept ‘a making box’ and encouraged creativity of all sorts. She herself sketched, made small ceramic portraits and, for a period, set up a regular Life Drawing group in our garden. I also learnt spinning, weaving and dyeing with her. But in high school I was pushed in other directions and, apart from a few short-lived attempts to return to art making, I did not start my dabbler phase until moving to Blackheath in 2012 in my late fifties. Since then I’ve taken up as many learning opportunities as I can.
