At the age of eleven I moved away from home to train, full-time, as a professional dancer.  So much of my life has been spent learning to express emotion without words.

As a young child, even before moving away from home, one of my earliest memories was drawing an ‘upside down face’ of Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother – when you turned it one way it was Cinderella and when you turned it upside down the face became the older Fairy Godmother.

I spent weeks in my bedroom, sketching out every little detail and savoured every moment - it was my first taste of pure contentment. 

I continued to draw and paint throughout my dance training but then as I graduated, lost touch with my art.

Many years passed and during that time I travelled the world, studied for a Masters Degree in Business, set up two successful businesses of my own, got married (and divorced!), had two beautiful boys and learnt many, many lessons.

Like so many others, life, responsibilities and other people’s expectations of me got in the way.

As I got older however I realised that there was a deep yearning inside for more. 

After years of soul-searching I discovered that it was a call back to art.  The longer I tried to ignore it, the worse it got until eventually after a long period of burnout I decided to honour what my gut was trying to tell me.

I made some changes in my life, studied everything I could to do with art…the foundations, abstraction, realism, colour theory and everything in between until I finally got to a place where I felt at home.

Every day that I moved closer to art, that emptiness inside started to disappear.

These days I get to make art every day from my beautiful, light-filled garden studio near Manchester, England and I feel deeply, truly happy. 

I’m also privileged to use my twenty years of business experience to help other artists learn how they can build and run, profitable and sustainable creative businesses. 

The fact I get to combine the two things I love, I am eternally grateful for. 

So in a nutshell, that’s a little about my life and how I ended up here.

Thank you for stopping by.

Amanda

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