​Most artists will tell you, it’s quite an isolating profession, and generally they don’t mind it. However, when we get the chance to go out and play with fellow artists, we will jump at the opportunity. 

So it was with me that I ended up with the Northern Boys, including their only female ‘northern boy’ Haidee-Jo Summers (who also leads her newly formed Lake District Plein Air group), for a couple of days this week, painting in one of the Lake Districts favourite spots. We were joined by the legendary David Curtis, ROI, RSMA who rolled up in his rather antiquated but smart VW camper van. 

My second ‘Postcard from the Lakes’ therefore comes to you from Elterwater and Skelwith Force in the Langdale Valley. 

The village of Elterwater itself is about half a mile from the lake Elter Water, located to the south of picturesque Grasmere, west of Lake Windermere with great views of the Langdale Pikes. If you walk through the forests that surround the western side which leads downstream, you will end up at Skelwith Force, a very accessible waterfall which surprisingly isn’t that well known to the many tourists that hit the area. Elterwater itself relies on tourism as it’s principal source of income and the village is popular with fell walkers. Only a quarter of the houses in Elterwater are permanently occupied. The rest are holiday cottages.

The ‘boys’ had been painting in the area all week and I joined them on the Sunday along with the Lake District Plein Air painters. Having recently recovered from covid and not wanting to walk too far, from the car park, I set my easel up close to the historic Grade II listed Elterwater Bridge which dates back to the 18th century. The bridge spans the Great Langdale Beck which bubbles and tumbles into Elterwater. 

The weather was extremely kind and not only provided the warmth we needed but also the light and shade that helps to make a painting of good contrasting colours. 

After a full day of painting, we retreated to one of only a couple of watering holes in the village. The Britannia Inn, a fantastic 300 year old pub in the centre of the village.

The following day, I joined the ‘boys’ at Skelwith Force, a delightful and very impressive little water fall not too far from Elterwater and a short 10 minute walk from Skelwith Bridge. This waterfall is very accessible yet relatively unknown and very lightly visited so we pretty much had the run of the place. 

After taking a photo of the ‘boys’ for their album, I perched not too unprecariously on a rock and completed my only painting of the day. Skelwith Force has probably never been painted by so many people in one day, though I enjoyed seeing the ‘boys’ immortalising each other in action, on canvas for posterity.

I am predominantly a studio painter and will gravitate naturally to the studio most days but living in the Lake District and having so many prolific artists visit on a regular basis makes a wonderful recipe for inspiration. Some days, you are so much better out than in.

Do you meet up with fellow artists often?  Do comment below and let us know. I’d love to hear from you. 

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Well! If this sounds like an Agatha Christie Whodunit, it probably is…  to me anyway!

I often wonder what happens to my paintings when they leave my studio, and even though I’ve kept in touch with a few buyers who are now valuable collectors, I don’t think I was prepared for the message that landed in my inbox a couple of weeks ago.

It was from a young student, well I imagine he is young even though I’ve never met him. 
“ Hello” he began, “I am a student at Rhode Island School Of Design, and am currently doing a project in which I will be creating a placard for one of your works ‘Alley At Agigya [sic]’ 1982… if you have some time would you be able to provide a little bit of background for the painting…?”  

‘Alley At Ayigya!’ (pronounced Ayija), My goodness! What a trawl back to a past I hadn’t thought much about in a long long time! After all it was all of forty years ago and I was a 21 or 22 year old art student! The memories came flooding back thick and fast as though it were yesterday. I remember in detail when and how that painting came about, and yet I have no recollection at all of what happened to it after I painted it or how it came to be in the US, or why it was now one of the subjects of a class called Curating The Modern: Modernis (sp?) at RISD. I had so many questions!

I fired back my reply immediately “Hello… thanks for your message! Gosh what a blast from the past! Do you have an image of the painting? How did you come to know of it? It was one of my student pieces from when I was at the College of Art [KNUST]  in Ghana. 1982 means I was in my second or third year… I’d be able to tell you more about it… It’s ‘Alley at AYIGYA’ by the way…”

And so continued our dialogue, “Hi Anne, thanks for getting back to me so quickly… I don’t currently have a picture… I can send you one this Thursday… I came to know of it through my Professor… for a class called Curating the Modern: Modernis(m?) at RISD… I’m so excited to learn more about it…”

”Thanks so much… if I recall, it’s a watercolour piece I did en plein air, we used to go out as a class to paint outdoors…, there was a lot of political unrest…, clashes between students and government…, the university closed for an entire year…, I was happy…. I was relatively carefree… “

It’s amazing how certain situations like sights, sounds or even smells evoke certain memories. The title alone had got me going but it wasn’t until the picture of the painting landed in my inbox that I began to piece it all together - properly.

“Here’s a picture of the piece…, we’ll be putting it in a exhibition at Brown in the near future…, my Professor is very excited you responded to my message…, is interested in doing an interview with you over Zoom…, thanks so much for your response…”

”Oh my word”, I wrote back, “my head is really spinning with memories…, that’s an oil painting…, the original sketch was done in water colour en plein air (we didn’t call it that in those days, I think we called it field painting)…”

Ayigya is a small village a short walking distance from College Of Art at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology where I studied Fine Art from 1979/80 through 1983/84. As students we spent a bit of our time there doing field drawing and water colour sketches which we brought back to the studio to complete our larger oil paintings. 

It wasn’t just the memory of the man, drunk and half asleep, trying to balance on an incline, or the little boy with the pot belly who wandered off to find a toilet, or so he told his mother when she called him back, it was also the memory of the small plank of wood that made up the makeshift footbridge and the artist Isaac Levitan who influenced my work then, and to an extent, now. The school library at my secondary school had a load of books on Levitan and I spent hours poring over these.

Art materials were scarce and expensive and that is pretty much where most of our grants went. We made our own canvas stretchers out of cheap wawa softwood, and helped each other stretch them, we didn’t have stretcher pliers, just our thumbs and a box of tacks and a small hammer, one person would pull and stretch, the other would tack and hammer. That’s how it worked. For canvas, we used whatever bits of board we found, plywood, MDF, chipboard, or whatever thick fabric we could lay our hands on - often White Drill fabric  (used for making school uniforms) from the market. For ‘Alley At Ayigya’, I ripped up a thick cotton bedsheet. We had learned a good emulsion paint with a good glue content would make a good primer. If we ever run out of Titanium white paint, we used household oil paint. That’s just how we rolled.

So forty years later and ‘Alley At Ayigya’, created in Ghana, has surfaced in Rhode Island, USA. The image looks like it’s been in some kind of storage. Where has it been all this time and how did it get to the US? I am intrigued and want to know more but for now I am really looking forward to the Zoom interview. If they have any questions for me, I am pretty sure I have more to ask. Loads more…

Do you often wonder where your paintings are, what sort of questions would you ask in a situation like this? Do please share your comments with me below ⬇️.


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Hmmmm, I’m setting myself up here and that’s worrying. I’m not keen on making resolutions so I won’t call it that so let’s see how long this one lasts.

Basically this is my idea; I want to send little notes from the Lake District once a month, more if possible, but once a month at least. I’m going to call it Postcards From The Lakes, and it will be in the form of a short blog with a couple of photographs and sketches, I might even add a short video log if I’m brave enough.

I moved to Cumbria just a little under two years ago and I’m having real fun exploring the area; the towns, the terrain, the lakes, and even the weather. It rains for England here!! So these little notes will be of the places I visit. The idea is to encourage myself to go out more often; walking, sketching, plein air painting, and sharing a little bit of the history of the area. You guys can be my buddy.

So welcome to Dodd Wood! Managed and promoted by Forestry England, Dodd Wood, located near Keswick offers some stunning views of the northern Lake District. For those who love to walk, there is a network of walking trails leading up to Dodd Summit for views across the fells, or you might want catch the Bassenthwaite ospreys from the specially designed viewpoints (April - September) taking in the odd red squirrel here and there at their feeding posts. The walk to Dodd Wood summit is only a little over 3 miles long but it starts off with a very steep walk uphill, so if you are thinking of tackling it, be warned! Take plenty of water!

For artists, this is an ideal location to paint en plein air. There is a cafe, toilet facilities, ample (metered) parking and lots of amazing views of the woodland and glimpses Bassenthwaite Lake through the trees. You could quite comfortably spend an entire day here. There is so much to take in just around Skill Beck along with its rolling, tumbling, waterfall and quaint little footbridge. There’s a different view for every visit.

OK so let’s not be in any doubt about it, art is work!  To some I may appear to be on a jolly but for me, painting isn’t always easy, income is intermittent, and I don’t always get the desired outcome much to my frustration, but the perks of the job make it all so worthwhile. Maybe I need to learn how to dine on the perks of the job lol. 

What are some of your favourite views of the Lake District? Do please share in the comments below. I may have it on my ‘to visit’ list..

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.