Before I was a painter, I was a psychotherapist, and long before that a medical secretary, a secretary /runner of the office of Chartered Accountants, and – the best – an usherette at the Odeon cinema, now long demolished. In the times when we went round between films with an ice cream tray. And sat at the back watching the films in- between times.

I was born in Cardiff, and aged 10 we moved to England. A very mixed bag indeed.
My teenage years coincided with the war in Nigeria and Biafra, and as a family we were friendly with two families who had moved here for safety, as the mothers had English passports. The least said about my secondary school, the better.

I began painting the year I received a scroll from the Duke of Kent (or Gloucester?) when I had done my MSc and discovered that some of the works, I studied for that were also the books Emily Ball, whose classes I attended, had studied for her MA Foucault, Bachelard to name two. How we see and feel things, what spaces we are in, the places we have come from...all of these are in our art, and as such make us all so individual.

I'm also a grandmother, called ZsaZsa – named so by the first/eldest one and it stuck for all time. I could never have invented that (it’s not lost on me that the only other one I know of is long-since dead)

I have always painted with oils, but am currently converting myself to acrylics, due to their willing combination with collage, their ability to be layered and the ease of paintbrush washing.

This is the first work I ever sold, in a series of six, which adorn a now dear friend's wall in Shoreham by sea. We have established a group called Drawn Together, after having a group drawing show together in Burts gallery in London, near Borough Market. We then had a few exhibitions jointly, but mainly we now meet for gallery-visiting, and lunches with wonderful conversations. The art of life.

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