My work is full of contradictions

My work is full of contradictions. I approach painting with a ‘let’s see what
will happen if I do this’ attitude. I change my mind a lot because I like to
explore. I recall in school inconsistency was something I was very
consistent about.
The only consistent idea I do have is to create something beautiful; is to
add beauty to the world. The palette knife is my magic wand, not so much
the brush but sometimes it is a brush. When I first started to paint for some
reason I picked up the knife and found I knew how to use it. I have always
loved to play with texture. I can scrape off and scrape on and in and
generally get into the paint like the mud I used to get into opposite my
childhood home in Canterbury.
Mum said it all started when I was about 2 years old. Dad had an electrical
shop not far from Canterbury Cathedral. We lived upstairs. When Mum had
to serve in the shop along with Dad she had to leave me upstairs in a high
chair. She soon found out that the only toys that didn’t find their way to the
floor were coloured pencils and paper. I was ‘happy as a sandboy for
hours.’
The subjects I had time for in school were Art and English. My favourite
teacher every grade all through high school was Miss Margaret Norris at
Glebe Collegiate in Ottawa, my art teacher. She used to hang my paintings
in the classroom and in the halls. At the end of my Grade 12, my father got
a job with NATO. We were moving to Paris! I couldn’t have planned it
better! When Miss Norris found out she took me aside and gave me a
lovely little Windsor and Newton water colour box. She said, “You have a
wonderful talent and you shouldn’t waste it.” She had gleaned names of
Academies from the biographies of famous Canadian artists where they
had studied and she gave me the list. That’s how I find out about the
Academie Julian. I was very lucky because my parents were always
supportive of me and my passion so I was able join the studio of M.
MacAvoy there and draw from the model. Of course I shared my
experiences with Miss Norris through letters.
While there I met Michael Hipkins, fellow student after about a year he told
me about Stanley William Hayter and his Atelier 17. We decided to go
together. Boy! We had jumped in with the big boys, listening to tales of
Picasso and how he drew and the like. I learned how to engrave, etch and
print in black only. I had only just been allowed to play with colour printing

when Dad decided it was time I went somewhere where I could get a
diploma.
My uncle Maurice Brown years before had taught at Hornsey College of Art
in London. So I left my cozy family in Paris landed in a grotty bed-sit in
Crouch End, North London. What a shock! I did the Pre-Dip year at
Hornsey. Next year I shared a flat in Muswell Hill for the first year Dip
(Diploma). After that year I wasn’t allowed to continue due poor attendance.
I was kicked out along with my boyfriend Mark Hornak. Ah Yes! The wild
and crazy mid 1960’s in London!
Mark’s Mum, Jean Hornak was a master antique furniture restorator and
decorator. She lived in Freshwater Bay (those white cliffs!) on the Isle of
Wight. We divided our years by living in digs in London doing temporary
jobs (from ‘tea lady’ to ‘zerox machine operator’ for me) until we couldn’t
stand it any more and then going back to Marks’ Mum in her big old drafty
wonderful house where she grew all her vegetables and plied her trade.
She had a fascinating history and was related to Augustus John the famous
English portraitist! I loved to sew and copied the style of clothes his wife
Dorelia had left in the house decades before. I found it all very romantic!
Under Jeans’ tutelage and to earn my keep I learned to do marbling and
with oil paint, and how to gesso, and rub down and paint and gild chairs
and book cases. I was proud that I could rub down a chair in under 45
minutes and paint one perfectly…”no curtains, no runs”. One time we went
over as guests of the Kleinworts’ in Sesingcote, to marble the outer hall and
their huge double staircase.
After several years when Mark and I had split up, I went back home to
where my parents lived (at that time in Brussels, Belgium as De Gaulle had
kicked NATO out of Paris by this time) I found myself a small studio above
a grocer shop and studied Art History at the Musee de Cinquantenaire. In
the evenings I painted in a studio at the Beaux Arts on extremely large 4 x
6 or 7 feet sheets of paper pinned to boards… The professor set up very
complicated still lives with a specific problem to figure out. It was lots of fun.
However, I packed up and left after several months when he picked up a
brush and repainted a passage. He ruined it as I had used a knife
throughout! That was it for me!! My job during the day was pasting up
slides in the Art Department at Essential Slide Services. What a pressure
filled job that wa!s Deadlines to meet every day!

Then I met my husband and we decided to move to Vancouver in 1976. We
had two boys in quick succession.
My first three shows in Vancouver were at the Queen Elizabeth Theater,
The French Cultural Centre and the Unit Pitt Gallery in the early 80’s. I was
painting on large handmade canvases I had bought cheaply from an artist
who was giving up painting for shiatsu. I used lots of material and
everything recycled I could lay my hands on, like fans and feathers,
because I was too poor to buy the paint to cover such huge areas. I called
them my Fancy Women Series. They were colourful, fanciful and
imaginative.
Closely following up in style, in the early 90’s I felt so strongly about musicians
and actors who died at an extremely young age due to the scourge of
drugs mainly that I painted several large portraits (48” x 56” average) of
Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to name a few. I called them
my Lost Legends. I splashed runny paint around and glued sparkly things
on the canvases.
After that I went back to my first love, oils. It felt like something was missing
when I’d enter my studio and not experience that first wonderful whiff of
oils. In the mid 90’s I did two courses; Symphonic Composition and another
one in Colour with Michael Britton at the Vancouver Academy. Both of
these courses were brilliant!.
My main road hasn’t always been but I’ve always felt it to be abstract
expressionism. I suppose I would call it this if I have to name it. I like the
act of painting with no preconceived idea of what the painting will look like
when I consider it finished. Generally I like to work quickly without too much
thought so that I am able to leave out “the critic”. This is not always easy for
me. And it is in fact one of my major struggles.

My prices range from $500.00 $5,000.00