Blackbirds in the Mulberry Tree, 1996 - 1998,

oil on canvas, 42  x 42 ins.

In 1970 she took up yet another art form, mime dancing, and appeared in several music theatre pieces, including Nicola Lefanu’s Anti-World, which featured a part written specially for her and premiered, to great acclaim, at the Cockpit Theatre with a number of subsequent performances elsewhere.

Lovers Spinning in the Sky, 2000 - 2001, oil on canvas,

42 x 42 ins.

Throughout this time, whilst bringing up three children, she continued to work as a painter and had solo exhibitions at the Morley Gallery in Lambeth in 1973 and the Manor Gallery in Islington in 1974. In 1979 she set up her own studio where she produced the work that was exhibited in the Everyman Foyer Gallery in Hampstead in 1981. It was also in that year that, with the children at secondary school, she enrolled on a three year etching course at Morley College. For the next few years, print-making was her main medium. In 1983 she joined the Greenwich Printmakers Association, for what was to become a 16-year association and joined the Printmakers Council the following year. During the 1980s and 1990s she had five solo shows, and two shared exhibitions as well as many mixed ones, as well as being on view regularly at the Greenwich Printmakers Gallery.

Loss, 2005 - 2007,

oil on canvas, 42 x 34 ins.

The work in this exhibition is more recent, dating from a turning point which, although its origins can be found further back, took place in 1999 when she decided to work independently and concentrate more exclusively on painting in the studio she established for herself in Stoke Newington in 1993.

Mothers, 1997 - 1999,

oil on canvas, 42 x 60 ins.

Looking at this latest body of work, it is not too fanciful to think that traces of all these earlier experiences can be seen in it. Are the vibrant colours of Blackbirds in the Mulberry Tree or Lovers Spinning in the Sky perhaps influenced by the vivid sights she witnessed as a child in Bombay and Bogota? Was it her experience as a dancer that educated her attentiveness to the delineation of the muscular curves of bodies in movement in Running Man, Loss or Archer in the Night Sky? And could the dramatic interplay of shafts of light in Mothers, War or Might is Right owe something to opera staging?

March into Darkness,

2004 - 2005, oil on canvas,

36 x 36 ins.

Past, Present and Future,

1999 - 2003, oil on canvas,

41 x 41 ins

In these 21st century works, several common themes can be observed. The first of these is a preoccupation with the way light falls on and defines rounded objects and the depiction of this process in colour. Sometimes this leads to the creation of intersecting prismatic geometric matrices that recall the architecture of buildings like the Gherkin tower in the City of London, where flat reflecting panes of glass have to do the job of defining three dimensional curves. These are often interlayered with calligraphic strokes and, in the most complex works, with other abstract patterns, as in March into Darkness and Lovers in the Mulberry Tree both of which, for all their emotional contrast, feature the same repeating design derived from an Indonesian batik. Sometimes the underlying geometry is softer, expressed through subtle variations of colour in a lyrical, sunlit palette that recalls Bonnard, as in Past, Present and Future, Hollyhock or the Mulberry Tree.