I’m a young adult with a difference.  I’m awake when everyone sleeps, and asleep when others are awake.  Even allowing for the interesting sleep patterns of teenagers, my sleep cycle is different from everyone else’s. I have a severe form of epilepsy that continues to elude medical expertise, despite brain and neck surgery, specialist complex diets, pretty much every medication known to man and even cannabinoids. For me, days and nights blur in a succession of seizures, unconsciousness, and then recovery – like a modern fairy tale, lying asleep behind a hedge of briar thorns. Only for me, this is all too real.

So, I’m turning my passion for Art into a means to take back control of my life. As school and the prospect of further education and work have become impossible to manage, I’m forging a successful career as a portrait artist, specialising in fine pencil drawings.

I find drawing fascinating. I’m very interested in the detail of faces –  I especially love drawing eyes, capturing that glimmer of personality- gentleness, warmth, humour  – whatever it is that makes them them. I work in 2B pencil, as I like the delicacy and subtlety that pencil allows. I always start with the eyes, then the nose and lips. It feels like a mathematical process, all about assessing proportions, and seeing the person emerge under my pencil.