About
My current arts practice consists of 3 overlapping activities:
Drawing and painting on paper - now less able to sketch out of doors as in previous years, work is more studio based. I use water soluble paints and pastels, working spontaneously, fast and aiming for fluidity, motifs loosely derived from 'ethnic' patterns or simply 'free-flowing' colorful abstract ones... Occasionally, more mysterious imagery emerges from the sub-conscious.
Multi-media collage work enables me to combine my love of fabric, paper, pattern and colour, acting as an offshoot of a long involvement with Creative Textiles. Paper and fabric are glued and stitched onto a background, a slower process demanding more precision and careful deliberation... sometimes collages develop over several weeks.
I paint colourful, bold abstracts - mostly with oils on canvas and board. Compositions can be arrived at quite slowly, playing with positive and negative space, dynamics of shape and colour. I often have a few on the go. My style is very 'mid-twentieth century', inspired by artists such as Braque, Matisse, Patrick Heron, John Hoyland, Gillian Ayres, Howard Hodgkin. Artists I admire are often also musicians such as Paul Klee, Serge Poliakoff, Alan Davie and Karl Bielik, suggesting parallels between jazz and abstract art. My other inspirations would be Aboriginal, African, Indian and Asian textiles and world quilts, which would mostly have been produced by women.
