Photo © Elizabeth Moltke-Huitfeldt
My artistic life began at St. Martins School of Art in the early seventies when art schools still considered drawing to be a fundamental skill. I try to imagine, now, that I am drawing with paint and much prefer a ‘painterly’ end result over a ‘photo-realistic’ one. In many ways there is a similarity between the physicality of paint and flesh and in my portraits I am looking to the paint as I ‘draw’ to express texture, energy and emotion.
Being tutored for several years under Jason Bowyer (President, NEAC) and more recently by excellent tutors such as Andrew James on the Portrait Diploma Course at Heatherley School of Fine Art has enabled me to become more experimental with my style of painting while also encouraging me to improve my drawing skills. This has resulted in being chosen by the president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters to hang in the Exhibition in the Mall Galleries in 2011 as well as invited to be published in ‘Painting the Human Figure’ by the acclaimed Atul Vohora in 2012.