A few years ago when I was going through a minimalist phase I did lots of simple pen and ink sketches, trying to capture faces, places and buildings in just a few black lines, by reducing everything back to its basic elements. Part of this project included a series of panoramic sketches I did of…
Category: Travel Sketchbooks
Dadas at the fish market
I’ve been painting this picture in my head for months now. The Kivukoni Fish Market in Dar Es Salaam is always busy. Both inside and outside the market walls there are scores of people; inside fishermen and traders huddle together around the many different catches of the day, outside house dadas dressed in brightly printed…
Swedish Summertime – and the living is easy
One of the things I learnt about Swedish people in the three years that I lived there, is that they really know how to celebrate and enjoy the summertime. In a country that is cold and dark for muc… Source: Swedish Summertime – and the living is easy
Buying and Selling Bananas in Kenya
This is my latest painting, a watercolour of a group of women buying and selling bananas and mangoes at a street-side market in Kisii, a town in south-west Kenya. The painting was done from a quick sketch I did some months ago while travelling from Mwanza in Tanzania to Nairobi.
Endless Abstract Land
Endless Abstract Land is my interpretation of the Serengeti and is painted using ink and acrylics. Serengeti comes from the Maasai Maa word Serengit and means endless plain and this vast area of grassland spans northern Tanzania and southern Kenya and covers approximately 12,000 sq miles. As I travelled through these immense plains, which are…
Art is not what you see, it is what you make others see.
I have been asked by art and craft company Patience Brewster to do an interview and to share some information about my life as an artist. Patience is an artist herself who designs handmade and hand painted Christmas ornaments. If you follow my blog, you will know that I am not a “proper” artist, in that I…
Painting is Just Another Way of Keeping a Diary
I was asked to paint some pictures for staff who were leaving Isamilo International School in Mwanza this year. These images were the results. Which one is your favourite? I am now off work for 8 weeks… so plenty of time for painting, sewing and lots of crafty fun. And as Pablo Picasso once said:…
An encounter with the rockabilly of the bird world – the pied kingfisher.
Keeping up with my Easter Resolution of using my art sketchbooks more, I decided to tuck one in my pocket as I went for lunch with my family today. And was so chuffed I did, because at long last I had my first encounter with the beautiful water bird the pied kingfisher. While having lunch…
Easter Resolution – getting back to my sketchbooks.
Over the last few months I have been so horridly busy, both at work and at home looking after my three children, that I have barely had enough time to sleep, let alone sketch. So I have set myself an Easter Resolution of doing more art work, initially in my sketchbooks and later moving onto…
Monkey Shenanigans in my Back Garden.
Before moving to Tanzania I stumbled upon a blog post written by a teacher who was working in Mwanza, about how her whiteboard pen had been thieved mid-lesson by a cheeky monkey. I remember thinking that this would be one of the best teaching anecdotes ever which I could only dream of experiencing first-hand and…
Celebrating the festive season in Tanzania and beyond.
This is without a shadow of a doubt my favourite time of year. Past Christmases and New Years have seen me dancing until dawn in Amsterdam, drinking champagne on the streets of Coimbra, sledging in Stockholm, having tea with a group of Bedouin women in Petra, visiting Sylvia Plath’s grave in West Yorkshire, raving in…
