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 coerced By Lindsay Kemp To Join His Troupe In 1969. I Was A Successful Actress he needed me .It Was Because Of My Performance in the Traverse theatre companyof "Anne Jelicos' "Sport of my mad mother"  Which Was Pure Butoh ,  A Mime And Expressed Overpowering Feeling.
My Time With The Troupe Ended In 1975 When The Performance Of Oscar Wildes'"Salome" In Which I Played The Title Role To Great Acclaim (At The Traverse Theatre) .The invitation to bring the show to london  Was Scupperred Lindsay Who Wanted To Play The Role Himself which he eventally did a few years later. 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 1983 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   they babecause they had  nothing to teach me And I Agree.

I Made Videos And Did Performance While There without any Support Or  Understanding . Frankly, None Of The Tutors Had A Clue Where I Was Coming From .What I wanted to learn was how to create my own work that is to say "the creative process"
After Graduating I Had Started Painting As The One And Only Thing I Had Learned Was That It Did Not Matter What  creative path I now chose and painting seemed managable I began  . I Went Straight To My Heart , To My Feelings As My Resource Asthat was all   All I Had to go on .I had not had any "training "or direction as to how to paint .But I did understand that it was a process and that one began and went on a journeyof discovery. Having begun with feelings I continued on that autodidactic  road,a self taught painter. 

I Have Been Painting For 40  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 that I am Surrounded By In Cosmopolitan Contemporary London , I Paint Religiously Intuitively ,ingenuislyAnd Figuratively With Verve .