I have been painting for as far back as I can remember if I include my GCSE art in 1970.  I have the original picture I used as a an example.  Guess what?  I failed art.  It didn’t put me off though and I continued to try different techniques such as sketching in pencil, particularly portraits of ballet dancers from the then London Festival Ballet now known as the English National Ballet.  I managed to sell one or two which was quite an achievement for me.  That was in the late 1970’s.  I continued trying various types of painting, including watercolour and soft pastels.  Some of my work here dates back to the 1980’s.  I remember doing a couple of pictures in 1979 of the War of the Worlds album cover by Jeff Wayne but I couldn’t remember where I put the pictures but I remember sketching in oil pastel Horsell Common and one of the fighting machines.  They are probably hidden somewhere in the loft.

In the early 1980’s I decided to have another try and went to art class with a friend of mine where I produced Corfe Castle, and Durdle Door in soft pastels plus a couple of other pictures in watercolour Puffins on this website and Trees in soft pastels. By the end of the 1990’s I’d had three children, so painting was not something I found time to do, but around the end of the 90’s I came across my soft pastels and decided to try again and produced a few other pictures including River at Rhandymwyn.

In 2001 after a trip to Sorrento I had another urge to get out the art materials and tried a new technique Pen and Wash and produced a couple of pictures of Mt Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples.

In 2001 I moved to Chesham and started to try Pen and Wash again Temple at Amaravati Buddhist Monastery  I decided it was time for me to go to an art class and in 2015, I found a local class through the Bucks Adult Learning.  My first picture for that, was of our cat Wellington in graphite.  From then on I have progressed and produced all types of projects.  So far I haven’t had the opportunity to display any at an exhibition, unfortunately due to COVID, which curtailed exhibitions for two years.  I haven’t thought about selling yet either.  I just enjoy what I do and sometimes I like the results, sometimes I don’t.  I just enjoy experimenting with the different styles and techniques I have learnt from my art teachers such as Zaanse Schans, Amsterdam.

I am a big fan of impressionist art especially Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, Cezanne and more modern artists like David Hockney to name but a few.  I love colour and as you can see some of my pictures have plenty of colour. Boulevard at Night, Robin Hood’s Bay, Yorkshire,  Rainbow Chameleon. Dull colours don’t excite or inspire me and I am always happy to try something new and if things don’t work to plan, to try and see what I can make out of a disappointment.

My nearest claim to fame was in 2018 when I had been to a meditation art workshop in Tring following a retreat in Bad Nenndorf near Hannover in Germany.  One of the pieces of work I had done was of a woodland in College Lake Nature Reserve.  I wasn’t that pleased with it and decided it needed a little bit of focus so I remember the church I had seen in Bad Nenndorf and painted it into the picture and put it onto this website.  Quite out of the blue I had an email from a local German newspaper expressing an interest in my artwork and so I appeared in their local paper the Schaumberg Nachrichtung.  It was an amazing surprise to see myself in print.  Later on it was published on the Bucks Adult Learning website.

More recently I have been interested in Urban Sketching by artists Ian Fennelly and Jeff Carter. I also follow Nina Squire the Pastel artist whose work I have admired for some time and I often do online courses with these artists for inspiration and guidance.

Enjoy.  Your feedback is most welcome.