“Retirement has given me so much time. I have been given so many opportunities to rediscover pleasures and revisit skills which I had attained when I studied art at degree level. But once retired, I wanted to try to develop a medium hitherto unknown to me.

So I subsequently became a member of Derby Sketch Club for portrait and life drawing and a local group, exploring pencil, pastel and charcoal. Initially it was the immediacy and spontaneity of working with watercolour which provided inspiration. The surprises and happy accidents that characterize ‘wet into wet’ painting as the painting evolves created a passion and love for the medium. Negative spacing coupling with a range of colours which blend or contrast, working for itself allowing the paint to follow its own path.

My work sometimes using pastel as well as watercolour is an individual interpretation of a variety of subjects beyond the simple recording of facts; original snapshots from my life, painting from the environment around me or from my original photographs of the memorable places visited and people encountered from my other passion, that of global travel.”