Starting my Art Career

As a wife and mother, husband and family always came first. I have always had a love and passion for painting since I was a little girl growing up in a war torn country, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), then forced by the new goverment to leave my birth country and relocate to South Africa and start a new life.

The struggle to start over and the pressures of bringing up kids and helping my husband run his business left me very little time to persue a career in art. Though I have done many paintings over the years, they have all been given away to friends and family as gifts. I never considered my art anything more than a hobby, and certainly never considered my work to have any comercial value.

Now that the children are grown up and have families and careers of their own I am able to devote my time to building my art career. I was pleasently surprised when people bought a few of my paintings and commissioned me to do a few others.

Though I have no formal art training, as a self taugt artist I love working with oils, but lately I have been trying my hand at water colours because all my art materials are in New Zealand where I lived for a short period of time.

The banner for this blog is a water colour I did a while ago. I love bright colours and this is my interpretation of an ethnic African village scene.

Much as working with water colours is new experience for me, learning about blogging seems even harder. I was not sure where or how to get a banner so I cropped a photo of the painting to use as a banner for my blog.


This is the uncropped photo of the painting, an unframed 13" W X 9" H (330X 230 mm) water colour. The photo can be enlarged by clicking on it. Most of the paintings I will be displaying on the blog are for sale, prices can be obtained by leaving a message in the comments section.