Ann’s Journal
How time flies!
I am amazed how quickly time flies by and I realise I have neglected my website journal. It’s rainy here today and a perfect opportunity to catch up with recent events. My new book ‘Poetic Woods’ was published in September last year and I am thrilled to say that it...
New book – ‘Poetic Woods: Experimental watercolour and collage’
Published by Batsford on September 14th 2023 Available to order at : https://amzn.to/41RaW6O Excerpt from back Jacket: ‘Through tangled copse and mysterious thicket, to glorious autumn leaves and dazzling summer glades, discover how to capture the secrets of the...
Our Magical Garden
Our Magical Garden Our garden is a nature reserve and is kept just this side of wildness. I am still uncovering small stone walls and steps, peeling back years of ivy to make discoveries, even though we have lived here for over two years. The seasonal flowering of...
Award-winning painting
Ann was awarded the Megan Fitzoliver prize at the recent Royal Institute of Watercolours exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London for her work ‘Gorse’. The artwork was created with water-based mixed media and included the dried prickles from the gorse bush it...
Creativity through Nature – May 13th. 2021
What a year this has been! I do hope you have all weathered the storm and found solace in art and nature. It has been an eventful year for me and because of this there has not been chance to write more frequent blog entries. During the first ‘lockdowns’ I was...
Devonshire Days
As I have mentioned before- we moved to a house in Devon in November 2020 that is a renovation project – the day before lockdown and here we are in lockdown again! However, government guidelines allow the builders to still come and work- and there is plenty of work to...
I’ve Moved House!
Finally .. We have moved house and relocated to the wilds of Devon near the river and sea. The house is tucked away down narrow lanes dripping with ferns and hopefully studded with primroses in the Spring. The garden is full of ponds and trees, camellias and...
A strange spring time
Well - it's Spring . The birds are singing furiously in my garden. The primroses and hellebores are flowering. The trees are in bud. The sun is shining in a cloudless blue sky.It is hard to imagine that unseen covid-19 clouds hang noiselessly around the garden,...
Sketching in China
It is crazy how time has just whizzed by. I cannot believe that my last post was when I came back from my trip to China. That experience felt like a personal cross roads - travelling to the other side of the world with people I had not met before and not...
China-‘Wenzhou meets London’
I am back from an incredible visit to China where I was invited to participate in a cultural and art exchange with a group of 8 UK and 8 Chinese artists.We were based mainly at The Nanxi Academy which is situated in a dramatic landscape in the Yandang mountains in...
#plastic-free 3
Here are the findings for my research into finding more eco- friendly alternatives to cling- film for creating texture in watercolour . Clearly these are only single samples and as we all know these kind of experiments can vary widely each time according to how the...
#plastic-free 2
Following on from my previous post I am looking at how we can cut down or replace cling-film as a paint texture-making technique. Clearly, any ‘single use’ material that we use instead is not ideal. Even if it is supposedly recyclable – the recycling plants cannot...