Autumn Years Print

Art and creating art is an emotion to me. It is visual poetry or a heart-wrenching novel. I live my life through creating and teaching art. My style has evolved over the years and although I use mostly Acrylic paint, I do sometimes mix my mediums. Collage has also become my passion. I can get mentally lost in a collage forever with the only limit being my canvas size. Interesting bodies and faces fascinate me and I really enjoy the female form the most. The soft, delicate features, and the way that light bounces off a woman's curves captivate me. I see colour in everything. Jack Vettriano is one of my favourite artists and has had an influence on my style. I usually use a full spectrum palette when I paint and I find that Acrylic paint has very vivid colours. Although I have often dabbled in oil, my temperament cannot work with it, so I attempt to achieve in Acrylic, what can be achieved in Oil paint. Bringing light into colour and painting on a bigger than life size canvas is my ultimate joy. I love a challenge too, so I keep pushing to overcome a bigger or greater hurdle. This is pretty much how I live my life. I see a painting and my life as a journey of ups and downs and hills and mountains. Navigating around these hurdles is the challenge and in many ways, all my works reflect something of my journey. Laughter being the best medicine and cure for everything! As an eternal student in this school called Earth, I explore many different subjects in my work. Painting an animal or a flower or a piece of old machinery is not as important to me as is the use of colour, light and shadows. I believe that a great artist should be able to find their way around any subject, so I like to challenge myself to succeed in all subjects. I teach Art to students who need some sort of guidance in painting. Through years of striving to find information that goes beyond text books has allowed me to accumulate valuable knowledge that I pass on where I can. It gives me great pleasure to see passion in people and to evoke it where I can. I was sponsored an Art trip to London in 2009 where I spent 3 weeks walking my feet off, getting lost and discovering the most incredible art ever. I spent days in galleries studying the old Masters. I was fortunate to spend some time with international artist Henderson Cisz who gave me some valuable insight into the Chiaroscuro art style. This trip changed my life in so many ways.