Charmaine Barber

I was a precocious 3 year old once, who talked constantly and asked questions all the time. Nothing has changed except the type and standard of my work.
When I was 9 and a half, I decided I would laboriously produce my very first cartoon magazine for the village we lived in. This was short lived as I had to use carbon paper in those days to copy every page!

I am British but live and work in Germany. My art is part-time as I am self-employed with my partner, selling ceramics.

I enjoy using charcoal for drawing and oil painting. I sometimes use acrylics or mixed media. I am learning all the time and sometimes experiment with sand on canvas, or I try out mono-printing in acrylics. As acrylics dry to fast, even when using retarder, I am thinking about trying out oil paints.

I want to make my art a fulfilling, full-time endeavour, not just by painting but by producing and using different mediums.

I love the old masters like Caravaggio, Leonardo da Vinci, and many others as well as Vincent van Gogh.

I am interested in sculpture and have made two pieces from clay. One is a mother holding her baby in her arms wrapped in a blanket and the other is a mad cat figure who wears my sunglasses! I also have a half finished giant b...

The only art education I have is through learning a lot, self-taught. I have done two weekends with Mike Skidmore, learning oil painting techniques. I also did a one-to-one in Berlin with an Irish artist called Eoin Llewellyn and start a Rubens portrait. I have started doing a once a week evening with Martina Reimann learning more about what is possible with acrylics.

I will be taking part from the 8th to the 13th of April 2018 on an intense drawing course at the Fine Art Academy in Bad Homburg, near Frankfurt am Main.

None to date, unless you count my studio.