A life of sketching – Introductory Post ( Click to read more)

I’ve enjoyed sketching and drawing for as long as I can remember. My mother, Myfanwy Kitchin, was a professional artist, in later life turning to ceramic sculpture; her twin sister, Bronwen, was an excellent teacher of Art and a gifted painter during her  hundred-year lifetime – they were both elected as members of the Royal Cambrian Art Society. Their mother was a fine watercolour painter and herself came from a family of artists and inventors (most notably of the first petrol carburettor on a three wheeled cycle in the 1880s!) My early childhood memories include the smell of turpentine and oil paint in the front room of our house, which was my mother’s studio, and the hours spent drawing in chalk all over the lower part of the dining-room wall – my mother had coated it in blackboard paint for my brother and me.

Since retirement from my job as a teacher of French and Russian I’ve been trying to think of myself as an ‘artist’! My husband Andy and I live in Rugby, Warwickshire, where I’m a member of the Rugby Artists Group and a small group called ‘Alchemy’. We have a very old cottage, a former farm house,  outside Dolgellau in North  Wales, which my parents bought in 1961 – it is near to Penmaenpool, featured at the top of the home page.