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 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. I have subsequently gone East and West too and for some or other reason, my body feels like it belongs 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 more crafty. I did this quirky thing when we went away for weekends and holidays, I always took a drawing book with and drew faces in graphite, I wasn’t very good but it was still something I did. It felt a little random but now looking back, I think I was being called. I find it bizarre that I was doing faces before I even knew that I wanted to paint faces. I wasn’t an artist and I had never done art so it didn’t make sense why I did this weird little thing. Just before my 40th birthday, a friend gave me the Artist Way and morning pages became a way of life for me, things started coming forward, like the fact that I was perhaps a stuck artist and had no idea I was. At a point I just knew it was something I wanted to do everyday of my life. I couldn’t see how it was going to possible, it felt like a pipe dream. At this point, I wasn’t even particularly fond of traditional portraiture but yet here I was, painting faces. 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 a day, for 7 years. I was a little obsessed and as they say, the rest was history.