About
About me
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I started painting at the age of ten years when my dad, who had no idea about appropriate gifts for a ten-year-old, presented me with a beautiful oil painting kit. A wooden box with a full-sized wooden palette, full-sized tubes of Winsor and Newton artist's colour, two large tubes of white, titanium and flake, brushes, bottles of turps and linseed oil, little twin dipper for clipping to the palette, sheets of oil painting paper - it really was the most beautiful thing, and I longed to charge in as soon as I saw it. I sat at the kitchen table that very day and painted the view out the window. After a lesson on the basics of landscape painting in oils from an artist friend of my mum's, plus a slew of how to paint and draw books, by my early teens I was painting plein air around the local beach, coastline, lagoon and surrounding hills. At that time I got around by bicycle, but when I found a spot that inspired, my mum drove me there, dropped me off, and came back to collect me several hours later.
Background
I took art at KETC highschool followed by a year at the, then new, Dunedin School of Art, before moving to Christchurch to attend Ilam School of Fine Arts. I was lucky to study there for a year under Doris Lusk and Don Peebles, among others, but with the need to earn a living looming large, I then switched to a B.A. At that point, art took a backseat through a variety of jobs, a return to university to complete a master's in linguistics, and a 16 -year stint in South Korea teaching Academic English at, for the most part, Korea University. I did, however, often return to painting in short bursts, sometimes longer, but always with the intention that when I retired, I would be able to paint uninterrupted.
More recently I returned to New Zealand and the small country town I began in. I am thoroughly enjoying the characteristic NZ landscape with its intense colours, special light, and changeable weather, which is all so familiar yet also forever changing. Currently I am focusing on landscape, perhaps as a celebration of being back home. However, if a flower in the garden catches my eye, I have to paint that too. And then there are the cats… and people ….and, …well, my old enemy, ‘Time’ is still around it seems.
The pond at Namsan Park, Seoul, South Korea.
My Art
In today’s rushed world, we get into a habit of looking without seeing. Art encourages us to see, to look more closely at our everyday surroundings and to discover the beauty there. Entering into a landscape, wondering about the ethereal beauty of a flower in bloom, being charmed by the quirky and independent spirit of a cat, carries with it a meditational calm or respite from the everyday worries of the world.
When I am painting, I am looking so hard and for so long that the separation between observer and subject begins to dissolve, and I can experience the deep calm that comes from being at one with my surroundings. This is what I hope to share with others in my paintings.
I use whatever techniques come to hand which will allow personal expression without mind to which of the current styles my painting might fit. Rather, my style of painting develops in tandem with whatever the subject seems to demand at the time. I try to keep an accurate representation of form and likeness which keeps me in the realm of representational art and somewhere between classical realism and a more impressionist style.
I have always loved working with oils for their rich glossy colours, and I work mostly wet-on-wet, in thin or thicker, more textured layers, as is called for at the time.
My Learning
I have had many teachers: at high school, the Dunedin School of Arts, Ilam School of Fine Arts, many other vacation classes, evening classes, as well as from books, from browsing art galleries, and more recently the internet, and yet I still feel that I am more self-taught. I have moved around these different resources as a bee gathering pollen, a little bit here, a little bit there, putting it together in my own way as I paint. I am especially grateful for the inspiration I have gained from other artists over the decades.
