Welcome to my website and to my studio in North Berwick. I hope you will enjoy looking at some of my recent oil paintings on the Gallery page.
Most of these paintings are inspired by daily walks along the beach – just across a golf course from my studio. If I walk east I walk towards Yellowcraig with the craggy outline of Fidra in front of me and wild flowers in the sand dunes. Walking westwards into the town I have the bulk of the Bass Rock on the horizon – the inspiration for many local artists.
I find many ideas to include in my paintings – reflections of the wading birds in the wet sand, the splash of the wave against the rocks and the small children in striped t-shirts with their brightly coloured buckets and spades.
On a personal note
I always knew I would paint but I thought you had to be older to do so because that was what my mother did. At the age of 50 she took up painting and after I retired from teaching and free-lance journalism, and at the age of 50, so did I!
I taught dressmaking and tailoring to adults for 25years, scripted and presented dressmaking, craft and flower arranging programmes for ITV and BBC television for 12 years and wrote 7 books to accompany these series.
Taking up a paint brush is far more absorbing than any of this. I enrolled for courses and Summer schools at Edinburgh College of Art, on figure drawing and portraiture, went on painting holidays run by artists whose work I admired and read art instruction books. I spent hours at The Portrait Gallery and National Gallery in Edinburgh where the MacTaggart seascapes were a source of inspiration.
I paint every day – sometimes during the night – because the most important thing I have learnt is that the only way to learn to paint is to DO it.
Lemon Curd
Pansies in a Square Glass