Description of work
Painting.

Artist's statement
We moved to Mull in 1978.  On a whim.  For all the years of our five children growing up, I worked in family businesses such as developing the first whale-watching business in the UK, a recording studio, 7 self-catering cottages, a large guest house and a working hill farm.  No time to paint, but a lot of experiences to make memories.  At 49, during a short time of living on the mainland, I completed a one year course in Art and Design, at Falkirk College, passing top of the class.  Since that time I have worked steadfastly to develop my skills, initially making more mud than sense on the canvas!  Luckily, my tutors taught me to take risks - to know that I can always clean up and start again.  It frees me from the restraints of perfection.
I work from my own emotion centre, intuitively, and often with a rebellious disregard for proportion and exactness.  In fact, if I can break a boundary, I will, either in colour or form, and I love extraordinariness - the 'otherness' of things.  I paint feelings and moods in colour, and it is more than usual for a colour to come into my mind - one I would never have imagined for that part of the work.  I have now learned to 'listen' to my inspiration on this as it is always surprising and always just right.  All of my inspiration comes from the natural world, which really covers every subject you can mention, to some degree or another.  I am particularly intrigued with metaphysics and the 'beyond' of everything.  I move colour accross the canvases, spontaneously and quickly, sometimes, to be honest, without really seeing an end result, which seems to unfold at its own pace.  The spaces between the start of a piece and its (always obvious) conclusion, can be days, weeks or even months.  My work is there to celebrate life - there is so much of it to live.