ON BECOMING A PAINTER

                                           "One is not born  a woman .. one becomes a woman "

                                                                                                          Simon De Beauvoir

                                                One Is Not Born A Painter .. A Poet Maybe ,An Artist .. Yes! 

How And Why A PainterEmotion And Empathy Have Always Been My Stock In Trade.. It Started In Childhood Dancing To My Grandmothers Improvised And Inspired Piano-Playing. I Wrote And Illustrated My Own Poetry As A Little Girl, I Drew And Painted And As A Teenager, Became A Professional Performer Dancing, Acting And Singing . I Have Been Dedicated To Expressing Feelings Which Have Became More Intense And Deeply Felt As I Have Grown Older

By 1969 I Was A Successful Actress With The Traverse Theatre Company ,An Experimental Group Improvising Daily As Part Of Our Remit To Develop The Work Of New Writers. When I Was Chosen By Lindsay Kemp To Join His Troupe In 1969 I Was A Successful Actress It Was Because Of My Performance Which Was Pure Butoh , It Was A Mime And Expressed Overpowering Feeling.
My Time With The Troupe Ended In 1975 When The Performance Of Salome In Which I Played The Title Role To Great Acclaim (At The Traverse Theatre) . Was Scupperred Who Wanted To Play The Role Himself. It Finished Me With The Theatre . I Became Very Ill At The Loss Of What I Felt To Be The Apex Of My Career .
After This Painful Experience ,I Lost My Self Esteem And I Became A Burlesque Artist And Made Money Working ,Amongst Other Places, At The Windmill Theatre In London. In 2003 I Went To Art-College. I Graduated In 1986 Having Staggered Through An Intellectual And Conceptual Bramble Patch. I Understood Nothing . More Than One Tutor Thought I Aught Not To Be There And I Agree.I Made Videos And Did Performance While There But No Support Or Any Understanding . Frankly, None Of The Tutors Had A Clue Where I Was Coming From .
After Graduating I Had Started Painting As The One And Only Thing I Had Learned Was That It Did Not Matter What I Did . I Went Straight To My Heart , To My Feelings As My Resource As It Is All I Have.

I Have Been Painting For 30 Years And Since Then Have Synthesized A Love Of Colour Line And Form With The Wildness Of My Nature ,Love Of Exploration ,Improvisation , Poetry , The Wilderness ,Flora And Fauna . Inspired By Textiles And Design Of All Forms She Is Surrounded By In Cosmopolitan Contemporary London , I Paint Religiously Intuitively And Figuratively With Verve .