Enquiry (Ruby)

Ruby is one of the prettiest camel's I've had the pleasure to paint, all velvety coat and lustrous brown eyes. She's quite a young camel so very lively and inquisitive about everything in her home at Pyndan Camel Tracks just south of Alice Springs in central Australia. This painting of her is the first of part of the series where I've enjoyed adding an extra dimension to the image with text in the background and around the sides: the camel information here is about camel eyes, which seemed appropriate given Ruby's interest in everthing and her beautiful eyes.

Follow

I was born in 1967 in the west of England and came to Australia with my husband in 1998, settling in Alice Springs in 2000. After completing a BA and a PhD in Literature, and a period with the British Foreign Office, I began teaching in 1995, which I’ve been doing ever since.

I paint in oils and while I have no formal training, I have developed my practice over the years through my involvement with the Central Australian Art Society and Studio 12 artists’ collective (life-drawing, plein-air painting, exhibiting).

I’m fascinated by the identity of things, what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called their ‘inscape,’ the internal power that holds the elements together and makes the thing unique. My paintings are an attempt to represent the moment of glimpsing or ‘catching’ the inscape of the thing, be it a skyline, a person or a camel. They also explore the way light works both to shape and to convey identity and feeling. The quality of the light in central Australia still astonishes me after years here.