In the Beginning Painting

Hi I'm Helen and I am a British artist who loves to create colourful and contemporary paintings. I use the medium of acrylic paint on canvas. Initially born and raised in the town Croydon near London, I now live down on the south coast in Portsmouth and I currently work as a Staff Nurse in the Portsmouth Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Although I studied Art and Design at college, I have gone on to gain a degree in Nursing and subsequently have a background of ten years in Adult and Neonatal Nursing. Although a challenging yet rewarding profession, I have always had a passion for art and painting and found myself in 2020 being able to explore my own creative style to a much greater extent than I have ever done so before. As a result, I have built and continue to develop a portfolio of acrylic paintings using an abstract and contemporary style, with each painting being a lesson, I believe I continue to learn all the time. I am proud to have my painting "A Mother's Love" featured in the Artistic Impressions of The World of Interiors magazine, June 2021 issue. My Artist Statement: As an Artist and a Neonatal Intensive Care Nurse, I can experience a complexity of emotions in my everyday life, either from within myself, or witnessing the emotions of the families that myself and my colleagues care for. My exposure to what women go through during childbirth, but also the separation from their baby, has lead my artwork to focus more on both female empowerment and on the intricacy of emotions we experience in our lives. I certainly hold an admiration for women’s strength, which inspires my semi abstract and modern artwork. I love to use bold and colourful acrylics on canvas and often use spray paint in order to achieve strong, even paint coverage. My use of bold colours and strong lines in my contemporary portrait and figurative art has evolved due to the compelling emotions that drive my creation of art. Mental health has become an ever more apparent and important issue recently, with the impact of lockdown taking its toll on many of us. I myself have experienced how exhausting it can be trying to cope with an ever-changing time of uncertainty and this has undoubtedly had an impact on my work. In the paintings I created during the course of lockdown, I have strived to portray a message of irony, connecting both what we are told by our loved ones in messages of support and how we should behave to help ourselves, with what is truly being experienced in the mind.