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Barbara moved
to Pembrokeshire about seventeen years ago, when, she says, "I felt at
home for the first time".
Her grounding in art
was in textiles. She trained at the West Surrey College of Art, and
was invited to exhibit at the Commonwealth Textile Exhibition in London.
Having moved to Wales in the late 1980s, she won a prize for her knitwear
designs in the 1988 National Eisteddfod.
self
portrait in fabric collage
 Three
years later one of her wallhangings was chosen by the BBC to be the centrepiece
of an exhibition at the Royal Welsh Show in Builth Wells. During all this
time, however, Barbara's main passion had been painting and since moving
to Trefin, on the north coast of Pembrokeshire she has been painting, mostly
in the medium of oils, combining this with a career as a hugely popular
art teacher.
She is a highly skilled
portraitist and can often be seen in the area, quickly sketching subjects
as they go about their daily tasks. To some of these studies she gives
her own pet names, and from these has evolved a series of paintings of
Gwilym, Dilys and Mary.
One old gentleman from
Solva proved such a characterful subject that Barbara found that she had
been following him for most of the morning. The gentleman was quite disappointed
when she explained what she was doing....
Her mother (also one
of her models) jokes that she is quite certain that Barbara will
soon be on the front page of the local newspaper, "Pembrokeshire Artist
arrested as a stalker!"
Barbara has exhibited
in the prestigious Oriel y Parc in St Davids, and won first prize in Picton
Castle's art competition in 2009. |
