My Story

Hi, I’m Elizabeth, Mum, Gran and born-again artist. I have always loved to create. I started in my mid 20’s making cakes, making sugar flowers and painting images on the cakes. Liquid food colouring is not the easiest medium to work with but after lots of trial and error (aka making a right mess) I got the hang of it. A number of years in and I was a busy mum raising 4 children. After a while I retired from professional cake making to become a taxi driver for my children. Also, I couldn’t face doing another Teenage Mutant Turtle birthday cake -17 in one month nearly finished me off!

I had been gifted a set of water colour paints and a small pad, how hard could it be?

Must be the same as food colours? Nope! It seems I love a challenge so I dug in and started to create all sorts of messes with this new medium. I loved the way the colours flowed into each other, the way they dried and the new colours they created. Admittedly, it was mostly mud to start with but I soon got the hang of it. I discovered a love of painting on big sheets of paper and created a few decent painting worth framing.

At no point did I consider showing anyone my work as it was just a hobby for me. A friend of mine took a photo of my framed painting- showed it to her husband – who passed it to his boss – who asked if he could come and see it. Bottom line, he wanted to buy it and offered a sum of money that really surprised me. It had never entered my head to sell my work. I loved my painting so much I couldn’t part with it. I did create him something similar though – but as a gift. I was just so surprised and delighted that someone thought my art was worthy of buying. My life changed not long after- as the saying goes- life got in the way. Single mumhood, a new job, change of house…and I took up the banjo! Yes, I was single for a long time.

Fast forward 20 years - a fabulous husband and a house move at the tail end of lockdown. Here I am, living in a beautiful part of the world surrounded by hills, and fields full of sheep and cows. We can have all four seasons in one day here, and the colours truly inspire me every single day. I am so blessed to have the time I want to get back to painting. I have spent the last three years creating a studio, playing with acrylic paints, and yes – making a right mess again! Playing with paint is a great way to relax and have fun.

Today, I still work two days a week in Care and Justice for Children in Scotland, but I’m also lucky to have the time to paint whenever inspiration hits me. I get to explore and invent and, because of this emotional freedom, my paintings are full of movement and colour.

I don’t have a particular ‘style’ as such because I find joy in painting anything I feel at any given time.