To be a pilgrim is to be connected. We are all connected, we are all related, there is no I and the other, I am the other, the other is me – that is what makes me a pilgrim in life and a pilgrim of the Earth. My pilgrimage is not going somewhere; my pilgrimage... Read more »
This is my studio for the summer. In January I had the great good fortune to meet a man whose passion for art extends far beyond acquisition. Over the years, he and his wife have quietly and consistently looked for creative ways to provide practical support for working artists. This place, on a hill in the... Read more »
I have walked three fields before I notice that I’ve noticed nothing. Well, perhaps not quite nothing. I had, with some glee, registered the frost on first stepping out and I’d enjoyed breaking the ice in a puddled tractor rut near the barn in the second field. Other than that, by the time I get... Read more »
It is hard sometimes to see any good in humans. Listen to too much news and it can seem as if we do only harm, contaminating all we touch. Echoes of King Midas, who, we are reminded by Aristotle, died of starvation – an ‘unforeseen consequence’ of his own vainglorious wish. At the moment I’m... Read more »
All day today I have been working at the printshop …and thinking about Helen A rare and lovely bird. When I last saw her, a week ago in the hospice, I had told her about finding a dead moorhen – ‘perfect, undamaged,’ I said. ‘Oh, so quite damaged on the inside!’ She replied. She told me... Read more »
At its deepest level, any poetic utterance grows out of a desire to overcome loneliness, to share experience. “Absence” Charcoal and Inks on Arches paper. 40″X 27″ approx For a long time – really since I started making paintings as a conscious adult – I’ve been troubled by notions of ‘self’ and of art as... Read more »
‘Gone’ Charcoals and watercolour on Arches paper. 13″ X 13″ In loneliness there is also some joy – autumn darkens. Buson (1776) Over the past weeks, as a result of the exhibition TREE at Beaux Arts in London, I have been asked several times if there is a ‘Japanese influence’ to my work. Sadly, I... Read more »
It has been two years this month since I picked up a paint brush. For two years or more before that I had been finding oil painting increasingly confusing. Nothing pleased me. At times the multiplicity of choices – brush, colour, tone, surface, subject and so on – had, without exaggeration, begun to make... Read more »
This story begins a long time ago, when I was a little girl in what felt like a simpler time. Out on my bicycle one summer’s afternoon, I found a wounded crow in the lane. Carrying it carefully home, my nan explained to me that farmers will deliberately maim a single crow – knowing... Read more »
Sand Martins are the smallest of the European hirondines. Flying all the way from south of the African Sahara, this one made landfall in South Devon at the weekend but probably died of exhaustion after Sunday night’s storm. I was moved to tears as I drew, thinking that this tiny, weightless, and now lifeless... Read more »
After Frost It’s hard to tell what bird it isSinging in the misty wood,Or the reason for its songSo late after evening’s come. When all else has dropped its nameDown into the scented darkIts song grown cool and clear saysNothing much to anyone. Yet it catches hold a whisper in my brainThat only now is... Read more »
