I have loved drawing and painting for as long as I can remember. My mum inspired me with her paintings and her love of making things. We always had a lot of lovely art materials around to use and on rainy days I remember sitting at the dining room table trying to paint in water colours one of the Beatrix Potter figures I collected. We always got special books at our birthdays or Christmas: pop-ups, picture books, illustrated classics and fairly tales and the joy I got from them has never wained. With the birth of my two daughters I relished cosying up together and reading to them; reading my own childhood favourites and discovering new ones.
Maple and What Clara Saw, published by Macmillan Children’s Books
l particularly love drawing children, animals and the great outdoors. Fortunately for me these three things are so frequently bound up together as my family are all happiest when we are outside walking, hiking, biking and swimming with our dog Maple.
I try and find time to stop with my sketchbook and capture some of these moments. I am not a very good at keeping a diary but one or two drawings from a holiday can hold countless memories. Drawings take time and somehow they capture more than elements in the picture but the passing of time and the things that have happened during the making of it.
I’m British and American but would quite like to be a world citizen! I live in Hitchin, Hertfordshire but have promised myself I will live in France one day and hopefully by the sea or a lake. Other things I love doing are being outside, pottery, learning French and Spanish,, the guitar (although I am rubbish at practicing), horse riding, running, yoga, walking and swimming in a lake, river or the ocean. I am definitely not one of those people who manage to do all of these things all the time but they are just things I always come back to eventually.
Portrait by Kasia Burke