Often it’s hard to imagine the scale or impact of a piece in your room -

How will it look outside a gallery setting with different lighting and furniture?
This feature will hopefully give you a taste of how something will look and feel in a sitting room, bedroom or office space.

CAN YOU TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND AND HOW YOU CAME TO BE AN ARTIST?
 

I have wanted to be an artist as long as I can remember and spent all of my childhood drawing.  When I was very small I thought that if you were an artist your job would be to draw something very difficult like a cabbage in the most intricate detail.  It never occurred to me then that an artist might not want to do that!

 I studied for a Masters in Fine Art at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art graduating in 1997 and as a student made very minimal and abstract work which involved sculptural elements based on the built environment.  When I graduated I worked in marketing for arts organisations in Edinburgh for some years and didn’t make much of my own work at all. It wasn’t until 2008 when my youngest child was walking and talking that I listened to my inner voice and started to make work again. I drew inspiration from the landscape that surrounds me in the Scottish Borders combining recognisable landscape elements with the minimal sensibility I have always had. Trees began to feature as a motif within the work at that point.

WHAT OTHER ARTISTS HAVE INSPIRED AND INFLUENCED YOU THROUGHOUT YOUR CAREER?

 So many…….
At school I discovered Joan Eardley and William Gillies - both artists that I continue to adore. When I was studying I was fascinated by the monumental colour of Mark Rothko and the minimal works of Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse.  All of these artists will always inspire me but you can add in Cy Twombly, Giorgio Morandi and Sean Scully. A couple of years ago I discovered Bridget Riley’s Seurat inspired landscape paintings made before her move into abstraction and they are stunning - the colour is mesmerising.  I am also continually inspired by the work of Earl Haig who lived not far from where I live in the Scottish Borders. 

YOU LIVE SURROUNDED BY BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPE AND ANCIENT WOODLAND. HOW DOES THAT INFLUENCE YOUR WORK?

 It is a constant source of inspiration and stops me in my tracks daily. It’s really the colour and the immense quiet that draws me in. I can walk for miles and never meet a soul.  And I’m a bit obsessed by looking at the colours within a colour. So a grassy field has undertones of russet and yellow and pink underneath a carpet of what seems like green.  A dark hillside has orange and vermilion and magenta - all very low key, but still there fizzing away. Punctuating these colour fields with a tree which captures, draws in and accentuates the surrounding colours is something I never tire of and it’s everywhere you look.  My paintings quite often feature the same few trees (and I visit them often) but their execution doesn’t seek to represent them as a botanical representation but uses their ever-changing form I suppose to explore the painting surface in terms of colour and atmosphere.