Having turned professional as an artist, some of the tasks I have to perform, of necessity is to keep up my social media presence. This includes blogging as often as I can. Now for some reason social media demands you do this with  some regular frequency, for example, at the same time each month or two or three times a month or whatever is required to keep your plates spinning, This can be a bit of a bind. It’s not that I don’t like blogging, in fact I do quite like writing and keep a daily journal but like many people I am starting to resist the urge to do something just because social media says you should. It’s a sure way of losing elements of spontaneity. So I’ll blog when I feel I have something useful to say.

So… here we are, a new year and my first full one as a pro. A few years ago I decided I would not wait until a new year to make mostly because by the middle of January I’d broken most of them and then I’d spend the rest of the month beating myself up because yet again I had failed to accomplish what I set out to do.

When you think about it, every new minute, every  new second, every new day that passes bring us an opportunity to make a new decision. We can put our stake in the ground at any time! No need to wait til the new year to make the decision. 

Towards the end of last year, I bought myself a yearly planner, the sort that’s designed for creatives, you know, to help you think a little bit about your work and how to set goals in bite size chunks to make sure they happen.  As it happens, this planner starts on January 1st and runs through December 31st so I’ve pretty much started my plan at the beginning of the year but that’s ok. I’m not against setting goals, besides I’m yet to come across a yearly planner that starts in the middle of the year!

What I’m hoping to achieve with this yearbook planner is to be able to have my thoughts and plans in one place with daily, weekly and monthly schedules that will hopefully help me to stay on track. I want to see how I use my time on a daily basis and planning ahead means I can pretty much hit the ground running each day. At the same time, Ill be able to keep an eye on my income and expenditure as well as keep little notes on thoughts and ideas that come to me during the course of my daily activities. 

So far, January is looking good. One of the decisions I made was to tackle the anxieties I have about painting outdoors and now make the time one day a week to visit a location in the Lake District. When it comes to inspiration, this area does not disappoint, and I am thankful I live nearby. 

I’m writing this blog at the end of the month and it has gone well. I am pleased with the way January has turned out. Bring on tomorrow. I’m ready for a new day.

I’ve been on a trip down memory lane these past few weeks, looking at some of the paintings I created over a decade ago and wondering if they are still happily ensconced in the homes they went to when they first left me.

My palette has not changed much as I tend to favour strong and energetic colours but what I find less present in my current portfolio are the vibrant Ghanaian themed paintings that brought me to the attention of the Society of Women Artists (SWA), and TV programmes like ‘Show Me The Monet’ (BBC2 2012) and ‘The Big Painting Challenge’ (BBC1 2015). 

For many of us sensitive and introverted artists, putting our art out there is one of the biggest risks we can take. On the one hand we want to sell our art to enable us at least to make some kind of living but on the other, there’s a level of vulnerability, our creation is out there to be critiqued, whether we like it or not.

Years ago, I submitted some of these paintings to the juries of several of the art societies in the UK for consideration to their open exhibitions and year after year saw them systematically rejected. In my frustration I even wrote to the VP of one of the societies; ‘What is it I need to do?’ ‘How can I be accepted?’ His response, to consider WHY I wanted to join the society got me thinking; but why not? Acceptance validates our work doesn’t it? Doesn’t it make us feel good about ourselves? Doesn’t it  make us feel we are doing the right thing? . Isn’t there prestige in belonging to these societies?

In the end in a bid to ‘fit in’ I decided perhaps to be more like the people with whom I was trying to exhibit. If I could paint like them, paint what they paint, see what they see, perhaps I would finally be accepted? 

Of course in trying to be like other artists I was in real danger of losing my own identity and for a while I did. Good art comes from constant practice and there are no shortcuts. My expectation that I could change just to fit in was outrageously ambitious and quite frankly - foolhardy. 

In my opening paragraph I wondered if these paintings were still happy in their new homes and I like to think they are, I took eight of them to ArtExpo in New York and 5 were sold on the opening day. A sixth had to be shipped back to the US after I returned to the UK because the buyer had been in two minds about it and decided after a couple of weeks he really wanted it. If that does not give me the validation I was seeking I don’t know what does. It isn’t always where we expect to find it.

These days I like to explore my boundaries. I enjoyed my Ghanaian themed paintings and was able to lose myself in the noise: the smells, the sounds and the energy; the nostalgia of home. At the same time I appreciate how lucky I am to express myself within two cultures and continents. It’s always a learning experience with the biggest challenge lying in applying the right palette to the right situation. Sometimes I am happy to lose my way if only to rediscover it somewhere down the line.

What has your journey of self discovery been like? I’d love to hear from you. Do drop me a line below.








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I won’t lie! I was really bummed last year when I heard I had lost my job. Once again, I found myself going through a mental turmoil of fear, anger, anxiety and confusion. I might not have been earning a lot but it was at the very least a regular income.

The thing is, we can order our lives a certain way for so long before something comes along and upsets our equilibrium. The well known saying ‘This too shall pass...’ applies to good things as well as bad moments. Our lives are constantly in a state of flux. It doesn’t even need to take something as seismic as a pandemic to change the trajectory.

So what do you do when you find yourself at a crossroad? For some, the route forward might be pretty clear, some might stop and ponder a while and others yet might just go with the flow... whither the road might lead.

All my life I have had an interest in drawing, painting, and sketching and it was no surprise to those around me when I decided to pursue a degree in Fine Art. However, along my journey I succumbed to some apparent ‘real world’ thinking and managed to convince myself I would not make it as a full time professional artist, so decided to retrain towards a career that would afford me the nice things in life that make people ‘happy’.

Time has rolled on and with each passing year I become increasingly aware of my own mortality.  Like my job, the celebration of my milestone 60th birthday in September 2020 took a hit and had to be cancelled, but this all added to a new way of thinking. If ever I was going to make the time to fulfil my lifelong ambition of becoming a full time professional artist, that time is now!

So, on April 6th 2021 in line with the start of the new tax year, I registered with Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs as a self employed professional artist. From this moment forward, my life or at least my career as much as I could control it was in my own hands. 

Does this frighten me? Yes of course it does. I don’t have the safety net of a regular income and my monthly income is totally dependent on myself as opposed to someone else but truth to tell if an employer can make your job redundant then really at the end of the day how safe is the net?

Am I happy? Truthfully? I am ecstatic!! I look out towards the changing views of the Ennerdale Fells every morning when I get to my studio and my heart rises with gratitude. Like the changing scenes in front of me, no two days ever have to be the same. A portrait, a floral commission, or a request to purchase some work I shared a few days earlier on social media all add to the variety. If the weather is nice (I’m still a fair weather artist but hey we can’t all be perfect!), I’ll sit outside and sketch perhaps an ice cream van which will later on become the subject of a large scale studio painting. Who knows?

One thing I do know is how grateful I am to the collectors of my work who make it possible to carry on learning, practicing, and painting.
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How about you? How have events changed your life or your career? Do please post a comment below. I’d love to hear from you.

As a child growing up in Ghana, one of the phrases that fascinated me most whenever I heard people arguing or asserting a point was...’you mark it on the wall and see...’, it seemed to be a threat, a promise, or a prediction, depending on the circumstance.

As I approach my 60th birthday this coming September, I find myself making little marks of promises to myself of things I want to achieve to mark this milestone year. It is not a bucket list, neither are they new year resolutions because I believe in carrying out tasks and events at the time they spring to mind. 

All of my thoughts seem to focus around my passion for painting, drawing and sketching and as I love to travel, well travel will be involved too. We already have a trip to Gibraltar planned and the decisions I am faced with? Deciding whether to take my pochade box and oil paints or a sketch book and some gouache paints which seems infinitely easier but I fear I might regret the decision to leave the oils at home.

The big one is a trip to the Bahamas, we’ve been planning this for a while and whilst we haven’t set a date yet, we already have accommodation sorted in the form of our good friend Cookie who now lives and works there.

The major project though (and one I’ve been thinking around for a while) is doing my own chronicling of scenes of my adopted home town of Northampton with rather apt theme ‘Out and About in Northampton’. I am hoping this with culminate in some show or exhibition and have asked my friend Minnie to buddy me on this so we hold a joint show together.

I thought by making my own mark on the wall and sharing it here, it would provide me with a way of being accountable, to myself and to my readers and collectors of my work, hopefully without the pressure. The idea is to enjoy the process and leave our own little mark; a record of the town in paintings, sketches and drawings... for enjoyment and maybe for posterity.

There is much to see here and I am looking forward to sharing it from my perspective.

What are some of the fun ways you mark your milestones?

Time is transient, relative, and flexible and has the ability to organise our lives so we can see it in the past by reflecting on what has gone by. In the present we can make plans for the future. I am reminded of the verse in Ecclesiastes 3, ‘To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven...’

When I find myself irritated and impatient at my inability to make time for the my creative process, I find it helpful to pause and take some time to reflect on how much progress I have made already because every sketch, every drawing or painting, good or bad, makes it’s own contribution to my learning process. 

As the year 2019 draws to a close in the fullness of it’s own time, I find myself taking stock of all that has happened concerning my career as a part time professional artist and have nothing but gratitude for those who have helped to make it possible either by purchasing my work or encouraging me in some form or other. In addition, I have been well and truly bitten by the plein air painting bug and am so thankful for good health all year enabling me so spend time scrambling over field and dale. Apart from some dodgy knees that is.

So I give thanks, to a God I believe in, to a family I hold dear, to loved ones, and acquaintances whom I appreciate so much because you have all been so supportive. To my ‘collectors’; MA, JM, GD, WH, JC, CC, RH, IQ, CD, BA, HL... some of you have multiple paintings in your collection. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

So with a heart of gratitude, I look forward with warm expectations to an even better new year.

God bless us all.

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Some of the paintings that found their way to new homes this year.

I’m driving down Regent’s Street, London and traffic is very slow. The blue flashing lights ahead indicate some emergency has taken precedence and we must wait. Above me, the Christmas lights display, splendiferous in brilliance sparkle along with the blinking and shimmering festive colours from the shop fronts and people rush around going about their business. The air is cold and crisp and I am reminded, this is my most favourite time of the year.
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But this evening, this is all peripheral, I am impatient to get home, my mind is in turmoil as I think of the past 6 or so hours. I’ve been at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters Paint Live event, and I want to dump my thoughts in writing before they fly clean out of my head, 

Earlier in the day as I walked round the show the thought had crossed my mind (and not for the first time) if I shouldn’t just grab my coat and shut the door on my art career gently behind me; no wonder I’ve received rejection upon rejection each time I apply to their open exhibition! I say to fellow painters, if you want to know why you didn’t get in,  seriously, go and see the show. The bar is set high!

The Paint Live day has become something of a tradition during the ROI’s annual open exhibition where artists are invited to create a painting within a half mile radius of the Mall Galleries and submit it to the competition at the end of the day. It’s a fun way to meet up with the many friends and acquaintances that have been thrown together through social media and for me another opportunity to practice painting outdoors.

I picked my spot on The Mall looking towards Buckingham Palace. My attraction was the flags which were on display all the way down the length of the mall, apparently a certain President would be dining with Her Majesty later in the week. The perfect spot would of course have been right in the middle of the road on a traffic island but with the level of police around, I thought that probably would not have been a good idea not to mention the chaos that would probably ensue as traffic whizzed past either side of me. 

Anyway, near disaster was averted when I discovered the quick release plate that connects my pochade box to my tripod was missing, Luckily,  I had a spare one in my bag (long story), which didn’t quite fit but kind of did the job. (Note to self, be sure to check and double check your plein air equipment before you leave home). 

Every year after the winning paintings have been chosen, prizes given, hands clapped, backs patted and congratulations rendered,  painters are given the opportunity to get a critique from the judges who this year were Ian Cryer. Past president of the ROI, June Mendoza OBE who’s portrait work I really admire and Haidee-Jo Summers who is arguably my most favourite living artist.

June pointed out the compositional aspects, the vertical this and the diagonal that pointing to the horizontal base line which gave it a solid grounding, “Thank you”,  I said, “now where is is weak?” “Your drawing...”,  she  came back immediately, “Buckingham Palace looks like a lump of jelly”, I laughed and thanked her. Ian had pretty much the same view about the drawing, “...if your shapes are too generic, they can look like they were just dumped there...” he told me. He was referring the the taxi in my painting.  “Also don’t forget to check where your light is coming from”. Yikes! Classic schoolgirl error! Isn’t that the first thing they teach you at art school?

Painting outdoors is so different to studio painting and I so want to get better at it and realise it takes time and practice neither of which have easy shortcuts. Painting outdoors teaches you to observe and can bring a certain freshness and spontaneity to paintings which I so admire and want to emulate. Increasingly though I feel it’s not just about being able to paint, it’s about finding and adding all those little nuances, the sprinkling of a certain magic dust that takes your painting from ordinary to extraordinary. 

I feel frustration and pleasure in unequal and varying measure as I wonder if I will ever reach my painting nirvana; frustration when once again perfection eludes me and pleasure because above all else it’s what I love to do. 

What do fellow artists think? What extremes of emotion do you feel when you paint?

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I am insanely envious of any artist who at the moment is able to dedicate their time fully to creating their work. I mean I know it’s not easy and working at it full time doesn’t necessarily mean  they are earning a reasonable living from it but that would be my ideal situation and my one wish should some genie appear and ask to grant me one; to be able to paint full time and to produce paintings that sell consistently.

I do know in many cases even for those who practice full time, no two days are ever alike and sometimes you find yourself on a real winning streak when everything appears to go swimmingly and you produce some seriously good studio or plein air results. Other days are just bleah and hard as you try things just won’t gel. These ebb and flow moments happen to us all and many learn to cope until their mojo returns from it’s unplanned hiatus. At times like these doing some studio work; washing brushes, tidying up, drawing, sketching, updating your website or social media helps.

So what happens when like me your creative time is limited to the same three days of the week? You have a day job so the bills can be paid so you can keep up your practice so you look forward to that time and then when it arrives you find your mojo has taken a hike!

When your time and your creative flow don’t coincide it can be pretty frustrating. However this probably is not the time for guilt and frustration but more time for any kind of input... magazines, museums, galleries, web browsing, YouTube, catching up with all those book marked articles you just never got rounding to reading. Input is just as important as output, it refreshes us by charging our batteries. 

Someone once said, art should not be created in snatched moments only and whilst this is true in the main, snatched moments can produce some of the most spontaneously created and beautiful pieces. Snatching moments when your time is limited can be quite tricky and we learn to adapt as best as we can.

We may not always feel like painting but just showing up at the studio helps..

The photo is of the view of my studio from my position on the sofa. I have my iPad on my lap and for the last 2 days I’ve been updating my website, creating links, adding to my web store, blogging,  and updating my social media. Input is as important as output. I need to remember this. 

What does everyone else do? Am I unique in this situation? Drop me a line below and let me know.

Plein air painters often go out on their own so it’s always a welcome opportunity whenever events are organised that allow us to spend time with loads of like minded painters.

I’ve attended A Brush With The Broads for 4 out of 5 events it has organised so far and have enjoyed each one in equal measure. At the end of September, we all gathered again, this time at Hall Farm Cottages in Horning in Norfolk for some fun activities of plein air painting, painting demonstrations and competitions. We even got to have at least one meal together. 

This year it rained! It rained and rained and rained but for the more intrepid amongst us this did little to dampen our spirits and we forged on stoically taking advantage of the short breaks and occasional bursts of sunshine.

To some it might seem a little foolhardy but we all have our interests and the little things for which we make personal sacrifices. When you enjoy it, it does not feel like hardship. What’s a bit of rain between friends eh?

I’m certainly looking forward to the next session and as I make my painting related plans for next year one thing I am considering is making more time with fellow artists out in the open doing what we enjoy best. 

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It’s a questions many bloggers must ask themselves, do I really need to do this? I mean who even reads them? Everyone wants to be on social media for whatever reason, some to promote a business, some to share a view or just because...

For me there are small anecdotes I want to share from time to time; nothing major but every now and again there’s something. Today I am just musing. What do artists do all day? Ha ha I think someone already made a documentary about that...

Well today was s gloriously sunny day. That’s another thing... we talk about the weather so much but then it is so changeable so a great conversation starter..

So like I said, it’s been gloriously sunny, it’s Saturday and I hooked up with my friends from Northampton Urban Sketchers to sketch sunflowers at Overstone Grange Farm near Kettering. It was fun and relaxing. The farm offers a pick your own service and was doing it for the first time this year and kudos to them I think it has been a success. In October it will be pick your own pumpkins and you know...? More grease to their elbows... long may it last.

The area would be great for plein air sessions and we have hinted we would love to come back.
in the meantime a few pictures... Have a nice day!


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It really is quite bizarre! What is it with me and cormorants? I had no idea I had any interest in any sort of marine wildlife until a holiday in the outer Hebrides in the summer, and after a boat ride round the Isle of Lewis, lo and behold, there I was, hooked on these primitive looking creatures.

When a fellow artist told me there were cormorants on the lake at Delapre Abbey, I was sceptical at first but nevertheless grabbed my camera and sketchbook and went in search of the reptilian looking birds. I arrived to find a single solitary bird in flight just as it disappeared into the horizon.

The young father who had brought his children fishing must have sensed my disappointment. 'Birdwatching?" He was curious and up until that point I hadn't realised I was. "Well in a manner of speaking", I replied, "I heard there were cormorants here". "They are usually on that tree over there...", he was  pointing to a cluster of tall trees a fair distance away, "You will need to get here a little earlier though". 

So the next time I arrived, I found perched high up in the branches a colony of 9 or 10 birds; some flapping, some with outstretched wings and one looked like it was feeding it's young. 

I really wanted to sketch the birds but they were just too far away to do this comfortably. My camera at full 300mm zoom could just about pick out the silhouettes. Nevertheless I walked round the lake to find the closet spot I could manage and grabbed a few shots. I was over the moon. 

For the intrepid plein air artist and urban sketcher, the lake at Delapre has much to offer. It's not just the wildlife but at different times of the day and during the different seasons, the lake can look very different. I am quite excited about spending more time here. Dare I say it? Watch this space