About

I am a Fine Artist,I was betwixt Somerset and the North Devon coast, but now have added Hampshire to my touring repertoire!

Having lost my beloved Collie Molly I am left with a mischievous old gent; a one eyed back cat called Shadow.

 My work has evolved from looking at the roots of festivals and carnivals; exploring myths, legends, animal totems and other worlds of a spiritual nature.

The Fiddle Player In Red, Acrylic on canvas board, 2010

My passions are painting and story telling; I have written poetry and stories for as long as I can remember. When I paint it is a very personal and spiritual connection and very often words enter my head. This then becomes a narrative for the body of work, I am possessed until the story is told. I do like to take the narrative further; creating a book , film, and sometimes puppetry.

My creation of a puppet theatre in Somerset was a realisation of a dream; bringing my story to life with an original soundtrack that I created. The handling of life size puppets was a challenge and as in Bunraku, I became a part of the set; it was very well received for the three weeks of Somerset Art Week in 2013. (Further information can be seen on the Nomadic post.)

My painting is very intuitive and experimental, figures sink away and then mysteriously emerge, not fully and not as they were; they evolve under layers of glazes and colour. Painting over a creation may seem scary, but is a risk of great pleasure; al is lost and then by removing   some of the layers there is an exciting new creation. This can be testing at times as they can become unreadable. The skill is knowing how much to tease out and not to overwork; but not to be frightened if I lose one another comes!

Since moving away from my theatrical content my paintings have become darker and often referred to as creepy; I consider them mystical and spiritual, there is a darkness that I have felt the urge to portray, a need inside, to hide and hold back. I have lately been thinking of revisiting my theatrical concept and fusing the two. This seems a definitive progression, more apparent after my visit to York, where I was working with the artist Kate Walters; at one of her workshops. I want to experiment, combining the music, the celebration and the paint; creating a conglomeration of content, medium, and spiritual energy ; with colour!

Red Jazz, acrylic on canvas, 2011

During the writing of my thesis I explored the use of film looking at Maya Deren; evoking transience and the metaphysical, a sense of being in more than one place at any given time. Being a dancer and photographer her films were driven by rhythm and music.               The animated films of The Quay brothers,  fused animation and puppetry, resulting in films of intrigue and mystique;  fantasy worlds, created with found objects, assuming new identities; bijou, dark and mysterious narratives. I created two films in response to the work of the Quays and Deren; Transience and The Tale, both approximately 10 minutes long. These can be seen on my main web site and youtube.

My later film, ‘Darkness to Enlightenment’  evolved from a short poetic story; the story was born of a painting; the Eagle Spirit.

Eagle Spirit, mixed media on stretched canvas 2012

The words lead to a body of work which then wrapped themselves around the words in the form of a book. The next most natural step, to me, was to create a film; to see my words in my head come to life. The story is of an Eagle Spirit who is saddened at the end of the world due to greed, lust, and materialism; no spiritual guidance. She soars the earth, discovering  women and men still surviving in coves and woodlands. Overjoyed, she calls upon Iris, Goddess of the rainbow, to unite the animals and people together. They then rejoice in the making of a new and better world; the film ends with them celebrating, closing with a young family  and the innocent eyes of a child. The music is very tribal and  trance like; a collaboration between  myself and another artist, Anna Newland-Hooper.  

Darkness To Enlightenment,
film still, 2012
portraying Iris Goddess of the rainbow, calling the animals and spirits

I had a strong desire to tell my story and explore other mediums; textiles have always ‘spoken’ to me, the way the move and can be manipulated and combined with other mediums; as in puppetry.  photomontage of my paintings, that formed the Eagle Spirit story;  digitally printed onto silk, 1.5m x 3m, the hanging is a symbolic piece, relating the story as a whole.

The Eagle Spirit resides at the bottom of the silk hanging; Erotica, Blue Horse, Lion and others float above

Puppetry, began many years ago as my children’s entertainment; this then developed into shows and workshops for schools, church and the community. These figures continue to arrive in my creative life; I have a fascination for the variety of movement and interpretation that can be achieved. A few found or household objects, a narrative and an imagination can give birth to a new world. Pleasure and therapy can be derived without boundaries; they cross language creed and age, movement can interpret the story as it does in mime and dance. I have used puppetry to reach out to children, the elderly and those in need of emotional distraction. I have in recent years introduced my mother to painting; she has short term memory loss and the painting has given her a vitality and new lease of life. I have actively encouraged a lady with latter stage dementia to try painting and to respond to puppetry, this is a very rewarding avenue and proves that creativity is a very important and essential contribution to life.

Masks and wolf waiting to be brought to life in a production at Hallr Wood -forest schooling Charlton Mackrell Somerset 2013

 

 

Puppet making at Culmstock Jubilee Fayre 2012