Summer kisses us with warmth and shows us the fertile future Nature prepares for us over and over. I love the translucent touch of watercolour to convey life’s fine veils of self-renewal everywhere around us.

Inspired by my recent week on St Mary’s in the Isles of Scilly comes this glorious thrust, drip and tumble of oils on canvas! Zoom in close and you’ll find more surprises than I could have imagined. When paint and painter dance the dance of art and heart anything can happen…

These are one of the biggest surprises to me here on St Mary’s on the Isles of Scilly. Elegant giants watching over small rectangular flower fields and crowning coastal headlands..

This little painting, 60 x 60 cm, is taking shape from drawings I made in a hidden grove near Zennor, Cornwall, tucked away from almost everything yet connected by the elements to all that is ..

I was led by a restless longing for remoteness and a return to nature with my art materials.. Here in a hidden valley behind Zennor on the wild North Cornish Coast, I find a cottage hunkered down among last year’s broken bracken stalks where honeysuckle tendrils can let their tiny new leaves lick the tender air.. I am so happy to be drawing in nature again.

My beloved studio – fit for action after a New Year cleanse! It can get quite built up and chaotic when I am working on a large painting or making studies of plant forms as I was during the Autumn and Winter .. This Spring I shall be teaching here again as well as making my own work and so it was time for a tidy up. I love my studio.

Cool, fresh, clean and flowing – the air, the stream, the trees and my hand – this first January day, in Nature, among the woodland dwellings of New Mill, Cornwall.

These senile sweeties have two upright, one intermittent and one missing ear between them and Heidi has rubbed the hair off her nose by sticking it through the railings too often! I fell in love with them as I brought them to life with charcoal on paper and had a strong sense of how very loved and loving they are. This was a thoughtful birthday present commission for their doting and delighted owner.

We are delighted to announce that our Christmas Art Market will run for a second weekend, over the 3rd and 4th of December at PZ Gallery, Penzance. Come and enjoy art from the heart, books and gifts .. mulled fruit juice and wine .. Saturday and Sunday 10-5

I’m excited. I can see weeks of work coming together in what will be a beautiful exhibition, Loving Nature’ .. two days to go until opening on Friday 18th November. Our creative quartet comprises myself, Angela Annesley, Ian Barnfield and George Clement Peer. Our show not only incorporates paintings, woodcut prints, poetry and a gorgeous film of a heron, we are also sharing a live event of improvisational music and dance, spoken poetry and a song of art on 23 November at 19:00. It all takes place in Penzance’s spacious and elegant PZ Gallery, near the Lido, and will be open daily 10-4 until 2 December.

I knew the rain was not far away and that more than anything I wanted to be here. Feet naked to the ground, bare canvas on my knees and oil paints ready at my side. I sat and moved my hand, my brush, as my eyes moved over you. You are the sovereign cherry tree in St Mary’s churchyard, climbed by children (and myself), scampered upon by squirrels, touching and touched by all. I love you. And as I completed the visual record of this precious time with you the first fat raindrops were starting to fall, precursors of the wild and stormy night to come.

I walk into this space and meet myself again. And these trees that I have sat with in the field and on the hillside, connecting with the wind that has drawn their branches into form, through my own breath, as I painted them there and then. And now, in the studio, clothing the feeling of them that lives in my body, with paint.

Autumnal sunlight and a stiff breeze tugging at the willow leaves, soon they will all have flown… My favourite paintbrush and a tube of black watercolour paint help me capture them on paper… They may become part of the twisting Madron Well pathway painting I am working on in the studio.

At the beginning of this new painting I went into nature to look, listen, breathe. And now with pages of drawings and one or two sprigs I revisit the pathway in dancing steps of paint. This one was a twisting path and I am open to some unexpected turns..

Autumn, and umbellifers are bleached as white and black as bones against the rust of decay seen in montbretia and bracken. Aloft, a fistful of seeds awaits the breeze that will both topple and untether, parent and seed, today and tomorrow – gifting future abundance. This oil painting is a work in progress, as patiently and with immense curiosity I investigate the dance of decay in the Cornish hedgerow…

A little figurative exploration that has brought me quiet joy in its making and its formation. It is painted in water soluble oils and I think my recent flower and foliage studies in watercolour have brought a new gentleness to my touch. It very much expresses my love of nature – and paint.

Here he is! A glitch with the blogging app meant I wasn’t able to share at the time what became of the little Cairn terrier portrait. I think I can safely say his strong character shines through!

A quiet study in watercolours of this sweet pea foliage melting into autumn dissolution. Each pair of desiccated leaves rising into the air from a single point on their stem, like fragile wings heading home.

Eyes, nose and ears – no two dogs are identical! Getting them into position is my starting point for a portrait, along with a loose indication of how their fur travels around these key features. Portraying the unique character of fur will take up the main journey time from beginnings to completion.

We can always choose to put ourselves in loving relationship with our body, our longings and that which brings us joy. Brave and beautiful choices take this swimmer towards the cold bright April sea. This mono print results from a drawing I made on the battery rocks in Penzance where embracing self and sea has become an art form.