Biography

I  grew up in the small West Coast village of Kumara during the 1940s and '50s, the sixth of seven children.  We were very poor by modern standards, certainly there were no luxuries in our household.  Art was my saviour and my escape.  My wise mother recognized this.  She provided chalk and a four foot high "blackboard" (actually brown linoleum) which ran the length of the kitchen wall.  Another shrewd provision (considering her very limited means) was plasticine. These two, chalk and plasticine, kept me and my twin sister (also an artist) out of our mother's hair for years.

My original plan at eighteen was to finish both arts and fine arts degrees, but two marriages and two sets of children put academic and artistic endeavours on the back burner for decades.  I returned to university years later and completed an MA and a Ph. D. in English.

I work mainly in two distinct styles, symbolism and abstract.  The first eight illustrations here are in symbolic mode.  In "Snakes and Ladders", the first of these, the cut-out dollies represent "the twins".  It infuriated me, even as a pre-schooler, to be referred to collectively as " the twins", as if I were not a person in my own right.  Consequently, joined cut-outs, chess knights, bookends - anything with two identical items - represents us.

Another significant symbol, arum lilies, appears in the second painting, "Granddad's Funeral" and in many subsequent works.  My early childhood memory of them in the church coinciding with a first awareness of death, and a vague perception of spiritual feeling, made arum lilies a metaphor for these interrelated concepts.
   

The chessman bishop appears n the third painting.  The notion of symbolism struck me forcibly as a child.  I had seen a chess bishop.  When I first saw a real bishop in full regalia, I immediately twigged that the wooden chessman's highly stylized mitre could represent the real person. The bishop chessman also symbolises the influence of the church in my childhood.

Back to Main Page