The Corner

Oil on canvas
100cm x 100cm

I grew up in the Ribble Valley area of Lancashire, and following graduation from Liverpool School of Art moved to London; working as a freelance illustrator on commissions for advertising, publishing and print media etc.

Following marriage I moved to Yorkshire; continuing commercial work until moving into art teaching. Since leaving teaching I have returned to full time painting; fine art themes and approaches now being my main focus, with only very occasional commercial commissions.

I have exhibited in: The National Portrait Gallery (BP Portrait Competition), The Mall Galleries (Royal Society of Portrait Painters open exhibition, Lynn painter-Stainers, Discerning Eye, Royal Institute of Oil Painters), The RBSA Gallery Birmingham, The Ferens Gallery Hull, The Kings Place Gallery (Ruth Borchard – Self Portrait Exhibition) – I have participated in 2020 Sky Portrait Artist of the Year. Member of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts since 2019.

The subject and central feature of ‘The Corner’ is a sink squeezed into the narrow recess off a life drawing and painting studio at the Swarthmore Education Centre in Leeds. As a regular attender of many life drawing groups and venues over the years, the Swarthmore studio most vividly reminds me of life drawing when at college in Burnley and Liverpool; bare floorboards, wonky easels, lumpy drawing boards, somewhere warm to spend all day if possible, and especially…the sink. So the painting is a tribute to all the paintings done in life rooms, as faithfully recorded in the accumulated evidence of the brushes, pots and palettes clean up; and structurally…the scene has many corners – hence the title.