I hope that this web site will speak for itself about the joy I find in painting, but there are other benefits too:

• drawing and painting intensively in a much-loved place gives me a unique sense of relationship with it. From the sunflower and poppy fields along the Seine where I first dreamed of "giving up the day job" to the kasbahs of Southern Morocco, via the villages of the Perigord and the luxuriant paradise of Dar Sinclair, overlooking the Bay of Tangier, there are places so special to me that they have become part of who I am.

• it always gives me a thrill to walk into people's homes and see my paintings on their walls, and realize that day after day they are living with something that I created. It is satisfying to know that my paintings hang in homes in Canada and Australia, as well as various parts of Europe, including two paintings in a remote dream home on a Norwegian fjord.

• my desire to paint brought us to West Dorset and our farmhouse home overlooking Powerstock Common, in one of the gentlest and least spoilt corners of rural England, where my husband and I run a Bed and Breakfast, and find ourselves surrounded by many fellow artists and creators.

• painting and Imagework courses that we have run/hosted here have attracted guests from the Continent and as far afield as Japan. There is real excitement in knowing that people are willing to fly in specially for something that we can offer them, and an even greater pleasure in hearing afterwards of what they have gone on to achieve.

• my web site has resulted in emails from people ranging from English and American art students wanting to write their thesis on my work or just discuss their own progress, to journalists from the national and Dorset press arranging to visit and write about us. One way and another, it gives us a lot of fun!

• perhaps above all, though, painting and drawing are intensely private activities in which I feel truly myself: me, in communication with my subject and my materials, learning more about all three in the process; learning to reach beyond trying to please a particular public, and instead learning to find my own voice, my own authority, "becoming who I am".

Comments on sketchbooks acrylics mixed media oils drawings

Rosie Britton

Gray's Farmhouse B&B