Dear Friends,
One of my first memories is of clutching a picture book to my chest and thinking, “Oh! If I could only grow up and draw pictures like these!” I was lucky that my parents, who were amateur oil painters, nurtured my artistic interests by letting me choose one art supply every time they went to the art store.
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Fast forward 15 years. I have written about how I struggled with mental health during my teen years and my adulthood. By my teens and early twenties, every time I picked up a pencil or paintbrush, my hand felt like it didn’t belong to me. Every painting I did looked wrong or ridiculous, and the painting sessions ended in frustration.
For over a decade, I didn’t draw a thing, and I wondered if that early joy that I’d felt with drawing would ever return.
It did. It wasn’t easy, and it took impossible deadlines (I had a five-week deadline to produce my picture book, Greenbeard the Pirate Pig) that forced me out of my head, combined with a deep yearning to create that I couldn’t ignore, to overcome the corrosive self-doubt.
Finally, my hands began to reconnect with my heart and my love for art came back.
And so it is with joy that I present my new-and-improved gallery on my new streamlined website. As I create more art, I will share it with you, and you will have the chance to buy downloads, NFTs, as well as traditionally made art such as oils and acrylics on canvas.
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To celebrate this long, continuing journey back to joy, I would like to share with you a download of one of my favourite pieces. It is a watercolour of two children sharing a book.
I would never want to go back to those days of darkness and quite frankly, despair, but I think that because of them I feel this new joy that much more keenly. Every day is a practice of gratitude, of remembering to breathe and allowing life to flow.
With thanks,
Andrea
[You may use this for any non-commercial purpose, including creating posters, greeting cards, or T-shirts through print-on-demand companies.]