It has taken me five decades of life to work out how and why I create! Something so visceral and personal has been a journey I have only realised in the last couple of years. After a lifetime of mental health difficulties and feeling on the margins of society, I was finally diagnosed at age 52 with Inattentive ADHD. Like discovering my holy grail, this diagnosis, together with the understanding of co morbidities such as Depression and Anxiety, I have embarked on a journey of authentic discovery. Middle age is to me like a second adolescence exept I am not rebelling against anyone or institute, but rather, mining for my authentic truth. I am literally experiencing and feeling my humaness for the first time. Unobstructed by any education system or culturally biased propaganda, I am casting off my chains of doubt and reuniting myself with who I have always been deep down with who I am right here and now.
I have discovered something not known to me before. I don’t follow a particular school of art or philosophy. I can’t over think of pre plan my pictures and make preliminary sketches and studies. I found a unique formula which is magically opening my imaginative core. I am learning to ‘trust the process’. I gather in my thoughts and rough ideas and after a few scribbled ideas I set to the canvas and freely express and go away and study anything necessary that comes up to be included. I love this way of working and is very informative as I love going down rabbit holes that ideas lead me to. I am an eternal student!
My neurodivergent brain is very very busy and loud (let alone annoying most of the time). It never really stops, so when I’m creating images, I sense that it is preoccupied with what I’m doing and I feel a real sense of calm and satisfaction. It is almost meditative when I’m engrossed and cerebral commentary wakes up for technical queries when invited. Its almost as if my weary chatty brain takes to an easy chair with a cup of tea and reads a lovely book until I need it! I’m making friends with it and healing all the holes I’ve picked away at for so long they don’t hurt anymore.
My themes are a sort of story telling; a melange of reality and my inner world. I think I am trying to make sense of reality but actually it reveals itself as ‘non-sense’. I’m coining it as nonsense art! I see beauty, hypocrisy, dystopia, mystery and autobiography in my subjects. Animals, people, fæ, nature in an ‘otherworldliness’ in very colourful canvases predominate my creating. I have illustrated some children’s books in colour and black and white ink, the latter giving my brain an internal gritty satisfaction of the raw scraping from sharp pencil and pen on paper. I work in such a way that the pictures become almost etched in appearance.
My work is either self generated or commissioned by writers for books and businesses looking for merchandise package design. I am the artist for fund raising material at The Dorset Childens Foundation.
