Anyone who knows me well, knows my map reading skills are somewhat lacking. I freely admit to not having a sense of direction at the best of times. Whenever I went travelling, in between earning the means to do so, my voyages were more a wonderful, bumbling discovery rather than a comprehensively planned adventure.
Now, there is no such thing as a wasted experience and I realise I am happiest soaking up impressions, colours and shapes, sounds, flavours and smells of new places rather than ticking ‘must-see’ things off a list.
Which brings me to my art. I am still building the confidence to truly express what I want from my work. I feel that I am still in the foothills. Do I envy those who went straight to art college from school with all the brio of expectation and assumption of success (however that worked out)? Yes, absolutely. I lost the confidence to show my work to anyone after primary school, nobody ever seemed interested. Even when I reclaimed art as one of my matriculation subjects (having relocated from Birmingham to Johannesburg), I was hugely intimidated by those around me, but it reaffirmed that I needed to make art in my life.
My working life was in layout, typesetting and computer graphics (the early years, pre-internet. You know: before they started teaching what paid my bills to primary-aged kids). For almost 20 years after that, my creativity went into the kitchen, where creating nutritious food for my extremely allergic children using niche ingredients, was a daily challenge.
Well, now here I am. My work is in the public domain and I have the confidence to stand by it and share the joy of making it with everyone. You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to buy it, just understand that it was made with the full commitment of someone who couldn’t, wouldn’t be doing anything else.
