Thank you for visiting my site. It’s a collection of my paintings and drawings – those that I think are good to look at but also those that didn’t work so well, or where I’ve had several attempts at creating something before either achieving a work that I like or giving up in despair! Every picture is a journey – a journey through vision, through experience and through craft. My pictures are not intended to be great works of art but expressions of how I see the world and interpret it through the media I use – mainly drawing and watercolour – and through the limitations of my skill.
The reproductions posted here are either scans or taken from my phone camera.
I loved painting and drawing as a child but for most of my adult life did little apart from a brief foray into oils in when I was in my mid-20s. What brought me back to painting was retirement, which has given me time, and the enjoyment I found in short course on botanical illustration run by an excellent teacher, Debbie Devauden. So the first of my recent drawings and paintings were of botanical subjects.
Physalis. 2014
I was also inspired by the wonderful portfolio books that my daughter produced for her A Level Art and I wanted to create something similar – a book of studies and commentary. I’d almost forgotten about mine until I started looking for some of my earlier pictures in order to start this site. This is a typical page…
What captivated me from those early botanical classes was the clarity of colour and light that can be achieved using watercolours and that above all is what I am trying to develop in my painting – images that reflect a little of the beauty of light and colour in our everyday world.
Iris 2014 Pen and watercolour pencil
Daffodil Studies, March 2015. Pencil and watercolour.
Valerie Adams Painting and Drawing 