roslynmary art.

You started painting later in life, is that right? What inspired or encouraged you to pick up a brush and start painting?
 
Actually, it began a lot earlier at my mother’s knee! Un be-known to me. 

It began in a house.  My first.  A house of sensitivity to observe, of garden, of flowers, of painting, of beauty.  The first two years of my life my post war family lived at Wingello, my Great Grandmother’s home in Orange NSW. Australia!

My Great Aunt Isobel had her florist room at the back.  I can remember being fascinated by the heavy scissors and secateurs on the bench and the spools of ribbons on the wall beside the door.  Silks. Moire taffeta. Wired. Spilling down.  And outside the door in the parterre under the two big Elms were Buttercups, iridescent yellow.  My first colour memory. It is only lately that I have pondered the significance of this beginning. Observation.  Beauty.  Sensitivities.  Flowers.  Creating.  They were all there.  In a house.

“What you live with you become” I am now in my 79th year, and from that beginning to now I have always had a pencil or brush or pen or keyboard in my hand, drawing, writing, painting.  Making a something that wasn’t there before. 

But in 2019 just before Covid visited us, these threads coalesced into ‘serious painting!’.  My generous family at Christmas gifted me with a term’s art classes in Sydney. I travelled down to Sydney from my Blue Mountain’s home each Tuesday night to my class.  I almost gave up, but my classmates corralled me and encouraged me to ‘Go home & paint!'.  I had thought that the classes alone would deliver.  Little did I know that it’s in the doing that you paint!!! That weekend I set up on the kitchen table… and have not stopped!!!