My life has slowed down considerably now that my children are grown – in fact it has slowed to a pace I find comfortable! This will be too slow for most people, and particularly in terms of artistic output, I will have to find ways to scale.

This picture of a campout in Ntwetwe pan with my mom and brother is to illustrate what I have found my work to be about. Some (many!) years ago I was invited to a women’s art workshop and asked to do a presentation – I managed to find some slides of my paintings and produced a power point for the other participants. The feedback was positive and encouraging and one of the artists pointed out that my paintings were about space and light. In those days I mostly did landscapes – a single baobab in a vast, flat, wilderness; Kubu Island from a photograph somebody else took (I still have not been there); a skyscape with setting sun. I surmised that I was escaping into peace and serenity through my painting, a way of coping with the chaos of a busy life. I see now that my themes have not changed. In the tranquil bush surrounded by birdsong and baboons I paint single elephants and birds – simple things. It is me.

I like space to breathe. I am capable of stillness. I notice things. Light is everything – how it touches nature and reveals its beauty is exciting to me. There is a poem by Wendell Berry that comes to mind whenever I sit and watch this world go slowly by:

‘When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.’

I believe that art can heal – it is an antidote to what most people experience as Life. My paintings are about the peace of wild things, space and light, simplicity and stillness. It has taken me a long time to realise that.