After almost 50 years as a journalist, 39 of them specialising in health services and health policy, and focused on facts and words, I have turned to photography and painting in acrylics and oils as a new way to view and portray the world.
I began learning to paint in 2017 soon after we moved to Leamington from Oxford: I learned most from the Warwickshire Adult Education course on acrylics, led by Nicola Richards. That gave me the confidence to exhibit my paintings and offer them for sale.
My photographs and paintings mostly focus on the colours, impression and feel of moving water and landscapes, and try to convey a sense of special times and places.
There are many photos that I have only recently begun to show publicly, depicting subject matter I could not improve upon with paint. One of the most consistently special places for me over many years has been Polzeath in North Cornwall, the small village with the big beach, the art gallery, and so many other attractions.
The Cornish rockpool scenes I have chosen to exhibit here are walked past every year by hundreds, even thousands of people, as they clamber across the rocks on Greenaway beach, near Polzeath at low tide. Small fresh water streams flowing through the pools make them even more intriguing and diverse.
Some people arrive bearing buckets and nets for ‘rockpooling’ – but few take the time to look downwards and marvel at the colours and shapes and the play of light and reflected sky on the moving water.
In my paintings my aim is to convey feeling and colour rather than detail. While many painters prize abstraction as their holy grail, I want my paintings to be recognisable as specific places. Nothing delights me more than people recognising places they love in my paintings.