About..
“a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it”
Hello
I am Jeanne-Marie and I have been on a creative and mindful journey for the past 13 odd years. It is one I am embracing everyday. Thank you for being on this journey with me and it has been an absolute honor to share this sacred part of my life with you.
Art and Yoga has been a sanctuary for me. I was close to 40 when I heard the call to creativity which had been calling me for sometime, eventually the whisper grew too loud for me to ignore. I knew it couldn’t be a practice I did occasionally but that it had to be a way of life, fully integrated into every fibre of my being. Around 45 I heard the same call to Yoga. Both have profoundly changed my life and I have a dedicated practice to these disciplines.
I am passionate about dedicated practices as it helps us move towards flow-state and to me, there is nothing more beautiful than operating within the bounds of flow-state.
“There is always one action you can take for your creativity daily.”
GREETINGS from Portugal.
I was born in Zimbabwe and moved to South Africa as a young girl and lived all over South Africa throughout my childhood. I also lived in the UK as a young adult for a short while where I started my working career in the Film Industry at the BBC, Drama. In 1996, I returned to Cape Town, South Africa to start my family and continue my career in the Film Industry. I remained in Cape Town for 3 decades doing life, love and everything else.
I have known since I was a young girl that I wanted to immigrate from the South to the North and I have finally started the process.
With South Africa not being my country of origin, I always felt a little on the outside of belonging, to the land, culture and people and at the same time understanding I could no longer return to my country of origin for the same reasons. In 2012 I started travelling frequently to Italy and more recently to Ireland, for Art and Creativity and for some or other reason, my body feels like it belonged in Europe. I can’t fully explain it but it was never far from my mind and the longing to return never seemed to leave my body.
I had no idea how it was going to work out and by no means, is immigration a walk in the park, things had to align. I had travelled to Portugal at the end of 1995 and I wrote to my Gran at the time, saying that “life is good here”. Little did I know back then that my life would do one massive full circle and take 3 decades to find my bones back on this soil, but here I am.
So beautiful beautiful greetings all the way from Europe.
MY CREATIVE and MINDFUL JOURNEY
When I left London in 1996, I started dabbling with all things creative or maybe it was crafty. I was kind of flirting with it but never fully committing to it. I did this quirky thing that when we went away for weekends and holidays, I always took a drawing book with and drew faces in graphite, it wasn’t very good but it was still something I did. Now looking back, it didn’t fit into my life or anything specific, even a little random. I think in a way without knowing, I was being called. I find it bizzare that I was doing faces then already. I wasn’t an artist and never done art. I eventually started art lessons but it was a bit mundane and at a point, I had painted a few faces and something clicked over and I knew it was something I wanted to do everyday of my life. I couldn’t full explain it or see how it was possible. I wasn’t even particularly fond of portraiture but yet here I was painting faces. Just before my 40th birthday, a friend gave me the Artist Way and things had started coming forward for me. In 2011 I started a practice of creating art daily and being in studio for 6 hours a day and I continued that without missing for 7 years. I was a little obsessed and as they say, the rest was history.
In 2017 I held my first Creative Portraiture, Solo Exhibition on Recycled Rooibos TeaBags, in Woodstock, Cape Town which was later published and featured in the Slow and Premier Magazine and Elle Decorate. I have been selling my art worldwide for the past 13 years and have been teaching online and in person for almost a decade now.
I continue to juggle my time between my studio practice, teaching online and in person, yoga and meditation.
I am also a dedicated yoga, mediation and tai chi practitioner and a qualified Yoga Teacher.
“In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.”