My relationship with art really is like an affair – I almost feel like I’m cheating on my writing when I paint!  But what a sweet love affair it is.  Since I was a child, I loved drawing and wanted desperately to study art at school.  However, Musicianship won out and it wasn’t until my late twenties that I finally got around to taking some classes.  It’s definitely never too late to follow your passion and today, I can’t imagine my life without my art or my writing and feel genuinely blessed to enjoy both forms of creative expression.  I think a lot of writers share these creative urges to tell their stories in new and exciting ways.  Authors like Audrey Niffenegger, Mark Haddon and Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) are also talented musicians and artists.

This piece is my humble rendering of Edouard Manet’s ‘The Grand Canal Venice’.  I’m a huge fan of the Impressionists and find that studying the old masters helps me to hone my own skills. The process of painting is remarkably similar to writing a book and one can really inform the other.  Depth, perspective and resisting the urge to draw hard outlines at the outset, all form part of the delicate balancing act involved in creating a good piece of work.  When I’m away from my keyboard, there’s nowhere I would rather be than in front of my easel, fingers stained with paint and Norah Jones serenading me in the background…