Gina is an established artist from Weymouth but now lives in Swanage. She retired from working as a doctor in psychiatry in 2003 due to ill health. She had dabbled in a few painting classes but decided to take her art more seriously in September 2013 when she joined the Isle of Purbeck Arts Club and went every week to their painting group. She then decided to have a series of 10 lessons at L’Artishe, a local studio in Swanage. By practising every day she reached a level where she could start to exhibit. She entered an open exhibition called “Words Works” at L’Artishe with great success. From there she worked very hard to get her name known in Dorset through art and craft fairs, Purbeck and Dorset Art Weeks and from there started to get offers to produce and display art for galleries in Purbeck, Weymouth and Portland in Dorset.
During her lessons at L’Artishe she dabbled with ink, and loving the vivid colours she has used it since on watercolour paper. She either paints on the ink or draws with artists’ pens. She takes inspiration from wood cuts, doodle art and pointillism but also a lot of imagination! Of course she has been inspired by the Dorset coastline and on seeing a sunset chose to use red and black in her first pictures. She then moved on to other colours and took the Jurassic coast and fossils as a theme. After that she wanted to try something new and focused on the doodle side of things to the extent that she achieved a pointillism effect from small individually drawn motives. She now uses a wide range of colours although sticks to a limited palette for each piece.
Gina says:
“Although I’m not formally trained, this gives me a freedom and creativity which is not constrained by convention”.
