Dorset Countryside

During our overseas travels, we had organised an airbnb stay in Bournemouth to start our sojourn in the UK. We had about a week before we were due to arrive in Chandlers Ford where we were going to housesit. We decided to fill in some time with day trips, one of which took us to Bath.

Our drive took us through green and lush rural landscapes. During our European travels, we suffered from severe water envy particularly in both Germany and the UK. In contrast, Australia is such a dry, brown and worn-down countryside.

We had no such envy over the narrow country roads though. Driving along English single-lane backroads with hedged edges is a bit nerve-wracking. There are a lot of places to pull out so that cars can pass one another. Somehow, on these narrow backroads, we managed to pull over so that I could get a photo of the Dorset landscape – green rolling hills, paddocks lined with hedges. It had rained the night before so everything looked clean and lush.

My painting is based on that photo.

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I was born in Queensland, lived for most of my working life in Melbourne and retired in the Coffs Harbour region of NSW. So, what do we oldies do when we retire?

Travel? My husband and I had spent several years travelling around Australia and overseas after we retired. We had sold up pretty much all of our belongings so that we could travel without the worries of house ownership. By 2018, we were ready to settle down again and bought a house in Sapphire Beach, just north of Coffs Harbour.

Now we were really retired and suddenly had a lot of time on our hands . We also had a house again but no furniture or furnishings. So, I did what a lot of other retirees do - I decided to try painting. I had missed out on finger-painting as a youngster as we didn't go to kindergarten and I had had very limited exposure to art at school or at home. So art was something really, really different for me.

Since then, I have managed to fill the house with paintings of some of the places we travelled. In some of the early pieces, I tried a variety of different techniques but I have narrowed my artwork down to mostly acrylics and charcoal. I am inspired by the changing faces of landscapes and also by the character in a human face - how do you captue that?

Currently, I am self-taught but am now searching for workshops with other artists in order to develop further. I am fascinated by how the viewer "sees" art or how the brain perceives art. An artist can create a scene in the viewer's mind with fewer strokes than even the artist realises. This is what I would like to explore further.