Her Story

I was born in Cape Town and grew up under a bigger, brighter sun than this one. I don’t think it ever quite left me — it turns up in my paintings, and in the bowl of lemons I keep on the windowsill.

I have lived in Oxfordshire for most of my grown life, in the same house in Clanfield, near the old bridge at Radcot. My husband built me a little wooden studio at the bottom of the garden, and I am out there early most mornings, before the post, with the radio on.

I never trained. I simply paint what is to hand — the lanes and hedgerows, a jug of sweet peas, snow on the bridge, and the lemons that are a bit of the Cape brought indoors. It is the lemons, I’m told, that got me called the Lemon Lady.

Each painting here is an original — oils when it’s wet out, watercolour when it’s fine. I paint them one at a time, and I am not quick about it. When one goes off in the post it makes me terribly happy, and I begin another.

— With love, Anne