"Charcoal girl with bob." Drawing

In the beginning there was a small town in Victoria, Australia, on a river near the sea, surrounded by farms and forests with excursions to the seaside, swimming in the surf, camping in the bush. Lots of making and drawing. After school was for projects, animals and making things in the shed. Before school was for drawing, actually during school was drawing as well. Always there is drawing. Drawing and fabric. Construction and de-construction. Colour and movement. Off to the city to study Fashion Design and patternmaking, working nights as a cutter and machinist. Always drawing. For work as a designer using watercolours, marker pens and gouache then computers mixed in, to design new styles and fabric prints. And in between there are night classes in painting. Now I freelance in fashion design and production. I work from my studio in the Macedon Ranges an hour from the bright lights of Melbourne, yes there are kangaroos, and wombats. Here is a link to my website, I work across a variety of mediums, including watercolours, marker pens, acrylics and oils, as well as carpentry, sewing, patternmaking and gardening which I think of sometimes as sculpture with purpose (the end result being clothing, furniture, flowers and food!) My art is about colour, texture and light. Sometimes representational and others abstracted. Representing and interpreting faces has been an area that has fascinated me since childhood. Studying faces, poses and gestures for use as a designer is also influenced by my travels and expeditions to museums and galleries around the world, where portraits are explored extensively and on show everywhere. In some of my work I’m exploring the idea of stylized faces as wall candy portraiture. The work is an exploration of a colour, painted faces, masks and illusion. The idea of self-presentation intrigues, the ‘everyday’ face and the ‘going out’ face. The painted face is a fashionable enhancement, but also a mask – it covers, hides and deceives. It’s a painted representation of the real face underneath the makeup. I’ve also been exploring how we traditionally represent the face, through styles and fashions in painting & photography. Ultimately women paint on their own faces, then the portraitist paints or shoots a version of the model, reflecting a particular style of portraiture technique of the period. This work uses photo images, from a range of time periods, as reference material.