About Me and My Art

Chat Session 3.

You already know my name, but what am I all about?

The idea of painting was one of those things that I hadn’t previously considered, however after watching some art related videos my head said ‘I can do that’. So… I thought why not give it a go.

Why not indeed, I had nothing to lose and had always been involved in some form of creativity. Everything from Dress making and Embroidery to Quilting, Smocking & Tapestry, and I have probably forgotten a few as well. I know, right, nothing to do with painting, however my whole family has always been very creative.

 So decision made, I was excited to make a start, and see what I could do and where it would take me. To begin with I watched some basic tutorials on Watercolour and quickly fell in love with it, (That was back in 2000.) and here we are now in 2023.

I am truly an Australian, none of this (‘what State are you from’ business), as my husband and I have lived in several States and holidayed in all of them. In our younger years we camped out a lot. 2 of our most memorable trips were camping in the outback of the Flinders Ranges, and camping on 90 Mile Beach near Sale in Victoria. We had a baby and a toddler with us for the second Flinders trip and some of the things I remember are washing cloth nappies in one of the creeks where we camped, walking up rocky hill sides for the view a lot of four wheel driving. (On the first trip we went on a wonderful flight, taking in all the fabulous scenery). The 90 Mile Beach trip, involved camping among the salt bush behind the sand dunes, the kids were a little older now and enjoyed fishing on the beach with their Dad, and playing with our dog who really enjoyed helping put up the tents by tugging on the guidelines, he was a great little dog. I can’t even put a photo up here as they were all on old fashioned film or slides.

I use my love of Nature and our wonderful Australian bush, Birds, Animals and Flora as inspiration for many of my art works. I just love getting out with the camera, even in my garden where we get a variety of bird life come to play and drink in our bird bath, and I can’t forget the Magpies who I love so much. They come in for a little feed of a wildlife carers mix I have, quite regularly, calling out to me when they arrive and singing away with their fabulous warbling and variety of calls. All the birds are such characters to watch from our lounge room window and we laugh daily at their antics.

I am very passionate about my art, and put all my effort into getting it just right, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I do creating it.    

Moving forward, I added Acrylics to my portfolio in 2016, and Abstract painting in 2021, and all three mediums are very different to each other in the way that they are worked.

I find them all fascinating, exciting, sometimes frustrating, and I love it all. My style is realistic, and I now concentrate my efforts on painting our Australian Native birds and animals, but you can also find flowers, and landscapes, mostly from earlier in my painting career.

I have shown my work regularly in exhibitions locally. Some of these are ‘The Gawler Community Gallery’, ‘Black Diamond Gallery’ in Port Adelaide, Clare Valley, and a few others.

I have been graced with winning the popular ‘People’s Choice’ award on occasion, resulting in some lovely prizes, but in general it is not in my nature to go chasing after awards.

On the left are my husband, and one of the two friends whom I invited to share this wonderful exhibition, the lady in the back founded ‘Diabetes Online Counseling’ and we gave them a percentage donation of all our sales during the exhibition.

I have now been painting for over 20 years (since the year 2000) and still enjoy it as much, if not more than the day I started. 

There have been many wonderful commissions along the way, with my work now residing in South Australia where I live, Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, The Northern Territory, Britain, America and Armenia.

Here are some examples from those commissions.