Biography
My art career has developed over the years from a series of happy accidents. Without any formal training, I worked for 20 years as a freelance botanical illustrator, preparing pen and ink drawings for botanical textbooks. Then, in 1980, I began to paint seriously. I have always liked the translucency of watercolour, and my love of plants naturally led me to choose these as my favourite subjects.
I am very fortunate in having a large garden, where I can indulge my passion for plant collecting, and cultivate many of the plants that I wish to paint. I am endlessly fascinated by the beauty and diversity of plant forms, and I aim to express this wonder in my paintings by varying my style and technique, according to how I feel about each particular subject. Georgia O’Keeffe, a painter whose work I admire enormously, once wrote “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else”. That says it all!
Since 1980, I have had twenty solo exhibitions during Oxford Art Weeks, as well as several in galleries in Switzerland, France, and Oxford. More recently I have had regular exhibitions in the prestigious Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, U.S.A. I joined the SBA in 2000, and exhibit annually with them.