About

“I always paint from life in natural light – never from photographs. I find there to be no greater beauty than in nature itself. The fleetingness of it tests me and keeps my work, and those I’m trying to capture, alive. In this way, the work becomes energetic and loose, and the essence and mood of a person or landscape emerge, feeling as if something greater is working through me. There is little more fun!”

Charlotte holds a BA Hons Degree in Music and Art. She trained at the Charles H Cecil School in Florence. She has had many solo shows and painted world wide.

“I usually take around 15 hours to paint a life-sized bust (head and shoulders) and ask that my subjects sit for me in three to four hour sessions, on consecutive days. I usually stay with the client until the portrait is finished and then leave it with them with once I am sure that all parties are happy with the result.

I believe that having an intensive session with my sitter, allowing for one on one conversation, together with their choice of music, I begin to forget all sense of myself and go into automatic pilot. That is when the best work is achieved. It is almost as if my hand works out the essence of the sitter’s personality, before my mind has even realised it. That way the result is true and arresting, almost as if I’ve caught a moment in time.

I trained under Cecil Charles who believed the Neitzschean idea that combining ones passion and emotion together with years of painstaking study and dexterous skill is the basis of great art. I have found that when my painting becomes automatic (through practice) something very spiritual is working through me which I don’t fully comprehend, I just enjoy. Only when I paint entirely from life and nature is this feeling I get of losing time possible. That is why I don’t use photographs for either portraiture or landscape. Portraiture however, is continually humbling and that keeps me forever challenged in an exciting and restless way”

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