Heather Blanchard

was born and spent my childhood in the West Midlands. After attending Wolverhampton and Chelsea Schools of Art, I spent my early career as a successful textile designer selling work mainly in Japan and the USA, also working as a part-time lecturer at Southend School of Art. In the 1980s I gave up teaching to form a partnership to concentrate on interior design, exhibition design and hand printed wallpapers.

The past seventeen years have been spent concentrating on painting and I have had many successful exhibitions in Essex, Suffolk, Shropshire, Wales and all over Cumbria; including successful solo exhibitions at Upfront Gallery Unthank, Courtyard Gallery Appleby, Gossipgate Gallery Alston, Pinfold Gallery Bowness on Windermere and Farfield Mill Sedbergh. I was recently the invited artist at the Cumbrian Open studio tour exhibition, and have been a prize winner in the 'Cumbria Open'. (which I have been asked to judge this year) I have also found the time to illustrate a number of educational publications.

I have led a fairly nomadic life and we thought we were settled in Cumbria having lived there for the last eleven years. However, the gradual move north continues! - and we are now in our new house and studio in Scotland.

In my painting, I continue to pursue my aim of emphasising the pattern and colour of natural shape and form in nature, but I hope that I have also succeeded in reproducing the experience of being in the landscape. I strive to create a sense of light and space combined with the very simple objects and features around us. I hope that my paintings work on three levels:To depict recognisable and often local images giving a real sense of place; to use perspective, tone and texture to create space and atmosphere and lastly to compose and organise the picture surface to make patterns that lead the eye comfortably around the image.

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