Why Can’t I Just Push the Button (Part 1)
I have spent the last 18 months building a website. This is the third version I have tried to build — I wasted another two to three years on the previous attempts. I came to this with no prior knowledge of how websites worked and the learning curve has been extremely steep. None of the previous websites went live.
I should give myself a bit of slack. And maybe even a bit of credit. I have been building a business during arguably one of the most difficult periods of my life.
I started out doing portrait commissions years ago — mainly children and pets. I remember walking around a large local cat show handing out little homemade business cards with my three year old daughter. She did considerably better than me. I mean, a cute three year old with curls handing out business cards — who could refuse. I don’t remember getting any orders. Then I got pregnant and stopped for a while.
I started again a few years later. Did a few commissions for Mums and Nans at the mother and baby group, a few from strangers online, a couple of local dog shows. I bought the tables and the gazebo and then Covid hit.
Covid was awful for everyone. But one of the unexpected things about it was that I seemed to have more time. I wasn’t working, I was still a stay at home mum, but there was less running around — apart from risking my life at the supermarket once a week and wiping down everything that went into my parents’ house with disinfectant. My dad was over 90 with low immunity. It seems completely unreal now.
The other thing that happened during Covid — apart from having everyone at home, which I actually loved — was that Portrait Artist of the Year (a UK TV show) started doing a weekly live painting session online on Sundays. A previous contestant would sit and paint a celebrity over Zoom and talk to them about their life. It was brilliant. I painted along with every single one and would then post my version of that week’s guest on Instagram afterwards.
And then I started painting my own work.
First a couple of pieces inspired by fairy tales. A girl asleep on the arm of a chair — Sleeping Beauty. A dark haired girl surrounded by blue birds — Snow White.
But the most profound change in my work came when my dad passed away.
He had a fall, and then all his other little health complaints seemed to collapse like a house of cards. It was the tail end of Covid and we were so lucky the hospital let us in.
A few weeks after he died, something came on the television about someone dying and I just had to leave the room. I grabbed my paints and started painting slashes of colour and then added a face. It wasn’t one of my best paintings but it let me express the turmoil I was feeling inside.
That was just the beginning — of one of the hardest periods of my life, and of an evolution in my work.
My mum lived a few houses away and I went straight from losing my Dad into caring for her, with no time to grieve. I had an operation and had to isolate before and after. Eighteen months after my Dad passed away, my daughter moved two hundred miles away to university. Seven days after she left I found my mum on the floor having suffered a stroke. She was in hospital for two months, unable to speak, before she passed away — the day after her ninetieth birthday. Five days later I was in hospital myself with sepsis. We had other losses and health scares in the family during that period.
It was brutal. And relentless. And all of it happened within a few years of each other.
And through all of it I had been going through the menopause.
But I had also been painting.
Putting into bright paint all the things that were too hard to feel, let alone say. Some of it just doesn’t want to form words.
— Jewels
(Continued in Part 2)