I was born and brought up in Staffordshire, and worked as a PA/Secretary in England, Ireland and Switzerland. My travels beyond Europe have been to N Africa and the Middle East, with multiple visits to Morocco and Egypt, and also to Jordan and Syria.

I have pursued a number of arts and craft activities, including weaving and ceramics as well as painting. Having taken the OCA Interior Design course I extended and decorated our then farmhouse home in the Yorkshire Dales, and my work was featured in Country Living magazine and on the Richard & Judy TV programme. I subsequently developed and ran ‘Hooked on Colour’ courses, teaching paint effects and working with traditional materials including distemper and limewash.

I then returned to my first passion of painting. Mainly self-taught, I have attended artists’ workshops in England, France, Spain and Morocco. After a 15-year period of residence in Dentdale in Cumbria, where I was an active member of the Green Door Studio group in Kendal, I have now moved north to live in the Artists Town of Kirkcudbright in Dumfries & Galloway, and am learning to love the richly-varied countryside of South West Scotland.

I have exhibited at the Brewery Arts Centre and the Museum in Kendal, in other galleries in Cumbria, and have participated in four of the Green Door Open Studio Trails. Now in Scotland my work has been shown in the Scottish Showcase Gallery in Kirkcudbright, and has been selected for the established Spring Fling event in Dumfries & Galloway in May 2013.

I have always been excited by colour, whether found in nature, in textiles or painted surfaces such as old doors or crumbling flaking walls. I love the deserts and the rugged countryside of North Africa and the Middle East, and tribal symbols or pieces of Arabic text are sometimes incorporated in my work. I work in mixed media, and often begin by splashing on paint to create texture and movement: my treatment of landscape is often semi-abstract. I use a palette of strong, deep colours, working sometimes from sketches or photographs, other times from memory. I love the work of the Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and I am drawn to the work of Paul Klee, and that of Ivon Hitchens and Gillian Ayres. I hope you will enjoy and respond to my work.