About

I have worked for much of my life as a sculptor. I exhibited widely, undertook commissions, won awards and became known as a sculptor. But in 1992 I became ill, I was diagnosed with ME and was unable to work at all. When I recovered enough to begin a little work, I started to learn to paint.

I hadn’t painted since I was a child. I started small, and for very brief periods, with Gouache paint. After a while I moved, excitingly, on to oils. But this was very tiring, and I could only paint a very little at a time and oil painting was a whole new huge ball game.

Years later, one of my first large oil paintings was a painting of a tiger; it was of Blake’s vision of the tiger and inspired by his poem Tyger. The painting was sold at London Zoo, with the help of David Attenborough, and I managed to raise my first few thousand pounds for tigers, and so began my mission to raise money for my beloved big cats in the wild.

The Big Cat I have mostly supported has been the Amur Leopard.  It is the most endangered wild cat in the world, with around fifty animals in Eastern Russia and a mere ten in North West China. There are many more Amur Leopards in Zoos, and there is a movement to breed, carefully and selectively, from Zoo animals for re-introduction back into the wild. 

The Amur Leopard is exquisitely beautiful, but it is hunted for its ravishing thick fur. Destruction of habitat is its biggest threat, but there are excellent conservation measures being undertaken to save this lovely creature, and a future for it is my main objective in raising money through the selling of my paintings of Big Cats. 

The Amur Tiger, who shares territory with the Amur Leopard, and the Snow Leopard are the two other principal species of cat that I support.

A major proportion of money raised from the sale of all my Big Cat paintings and drawings goes towards the vital goal to save the very Crown Jewels of our beloved planet.

In 2015 I returned to actively performing music again. I took up the cello, which was a major undertaking so far on in life. Thrilled with being, once again, reunited with this passion, I wanted to express my joy in my visual art and began a series of musicians performing. There are moments, during a performance of great music, when the performing artist is opened up emotionally, abandoned and lost in the music. We are privileged to witness these intimate moments - No other art form subjects a human being to such public nakedness. I am fascinated and drawn to the extreme moments of being. I identify with what they feel and am also lifted out of myself. In this work I am trying to capture these peaks of expression, as before I have tried to capture the nobility and power of the horse or the speed of the cheetah at full stretch.  

A couple of years later saw another change of direction in my creative life. I felt a longing (and a need) to return to the subject of Big Cats and a desire to experiment with painting them, this time, in the fleeting nature of watercolour - another new technique to study, after many years painting in oils. I had, a few years before, spent a period panting in gouache, a heavier watercolour medium, so pure watercolour was not totally new. I had then painted Glass Vessels, painting very thin and in layers, and was enormously attracted to the medium's transparency and luminescence, eminently suited to describing glass. This time, I was reaching for lightness, delicacy, and experience of speed through my depictions of Cheetahs, at full speed, power and agility, gracefully chasing their equally beautiful and graceful prey. Some Lions pursuing prey followed, then Tigers. 

These experimentations with movement morphed into the subject of Dance. During this time, I also experimented with portraits in watercolour. 

Over this last upheaving year, I returned, once again, to working with an earlier subject - that of birds in flight, and, in particular, that most graceful of birds, the Tern. Not for nothing is the Arctic Tern called the Sea Swallow! It has been so exciting to experiment with watercolour in all its forms and powers of expression, and its paramount ability to portray a luminous transparency and evanescent insubstantiality. 

White birds and water has continued with the Swan, and finally, the Gannet, who, after diving into the water, continues to fly under the water! After closing its wings against its sides, the Gannet dives into the sea at huge speeds of up to around sixty miles an hour.  I find the underwater world a magical dreamlike world, and these ghostly birds twist and turn in a frenzied dance in their pursuit of fish. Diving into the sea, they release a stream of air bubbles behind them. It is a thrilling, dramatic and challenging subject.  

Through these many different subjects runs a strong artistic and aesthetic link - that of movement, atmosphere and mood. As I immerse myself into each new facet of poetic description, I live it fully in the imagination. So intense is this immersion that I long to pursue the life of my imagination in actuality. When I first painted Terns, some years ago, I returned to my love of flying a Glider, and tossed and dived in the air, bird-like, with ecstatic joy. Now, just having completed my first painting of Gannets flying under the water, I long to turn my imagination unto reality, and experience that bewitching world. Maybe . . . ?

Penny has exhibited widely in group and solo shows, amongst which galleries are featured the Royal Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy summer exhibitions, the Leicester Galleries, Ackermans of Old Bond Street, Piccadilly, the Tryon Gallery, Lamp of Lothian Trust, Haddington, East Lothian, (shared with the painter Brenda Lenaghan) and the Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh. She has held solo exhibitions in a number of galleries, including Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, (sculpture) Edinburgh Central Library – an Edinburgh Festival retrospective exhibition of her sculpture, a solo exhibition of horse bronzes in Adelaide, Australia. Old Gala House, Galashiels, Scottish Borders. (painting and sculpture)

MAJOR COMMISSIONS INCLUDE:

• Life size otter, cast in bronze; a Memorial to Gavin Maxwell for Galloway Wildlife Trust

• Life size otter, cast in bronze, for the Forestry commission.

• Welded steel wall sculpture for Albion Steel Works, Edinburgh.

• Welded steel sculpture for the Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford.

• Sculpture in welded steel and bronze, for the gardens of The Earl Haig, Bemersyde, Melrose, Scottish Borders.

• Life size roe deer, in cast bronze, for Sir Patrick McCall of Inverhay, Kirkcudbrightshire