Before I start to share details of how I create some of my paintings, I thought I would share a bit more about me. Give you a bit of a background into how Studio 3 Art was born!
I’ve been in the corporate world for most of my life. I’ve had to be a quick learner, knowledgeable and flexible in that world. Was I always happy? No but it did pay the bills and I made some great friends along the way.
I loved art at school. Picked it up and put it down over the years when life takes over. After my first marriage went down the pan, my kids were my priority so not much free time. It really wasn’t until the Covid years when I was furloughed during lockdown, that I had the time to look to art again for sanity.
Water colours I can do, but as much as the title is in the medium, I always thought my water colours paintings were not strong enough for me in colour. Oils, I find difficult to work with so when I saw fluid artists working with colour and using a variety of techniques, it really did resonate with me. It re-lit that creative side of me and off to Amazon I went and ordered my first set of ready mixed Arteza paints and a couple of 8inch canvases and took to the garden to paint!
Pouring, tipping and blow torching my way through many mistakes. It really wasn’t as easy as those artists made it look but I was learning and, exciting to be covered in paint again.
Of course, we all eventually went back to work, and I did keep the paint flowing when I could, doing commissions and having a successful window display in a tattooist shop in Farringdon, Oxford for a while selling pieces.
My hubby and I moved to Rayleigh, Essex in 2021 and I had two water colour commissions but pretty much stopped art all together after they were finished. Fluid art and on the sizes of canvasses I wanted to work on, was becoming harder to do without covering the house in paint! I am a little messy…
Then the clock stopped: In mid-2022 I was diagnosed with bladder cancer and that entire year I felt like I lived in hospitals, lived in a fog, and rarely slept.
It stopped me in my tracks and my husband, and I had a BIG rethink.
How many times do you hear ‘life is too short’ and something like cancer hits you smack between your eyes. This was where I was. I didn’t want to do my day job anymore. I really wanted to create. How do we do this and when can I make art my day job?
My biggest supporters my kids and husband were encouraging me to go for it and when my husband, my motivator, came home and said he had taken one of the shops in Berry’s Arcade, Rayleigh, for me to use as a studio to create to my heart’s content, I was both happy and terrified all in one very big emotion!
No more talking about it. Take that leap of faith and create!
I officially, stop my life in the corporate world around Christmas 2023 and have started to reduce my hours and work more in my studio.
No pressure to sell anything … but it would be nice. Just create and share the window space with other local artists so they can show their talents too.
