I love art! I love looking at art! I love creating it and sharing it!
If I could remember the day of my birth in Cambridgeshire, England, I’m sure I would say that I loved art since I was born. By the time I was sixteen, my father and my grandmother, artist Lucy Day, were encouraging me to study art as a career. So, in 1985, I enrolled in a 2 year General Art & Design course at Isle College, Cambridgeshire, where I studied fine art, graphic design, textiles, print making, pottery, photography, metal work, etc.
 
After earning my diploma, it began to dawn on me that loving art in all its various forms was not going to feed me and pay my bills. That was when I decided to specialize in graphic design. My goal was to combine practicality with personal satisfaction. In 1987, I entered a two-year program at Suffolk New College, Ipswich, Suffolk, in HND Design Communications. There, I studied design, advertising, illustration and typography. I continued on to earn my BA, graduating with honors in 1991.

​

During this time, I did some freelancing in illustration. My clients included Cable & Wireless (Caribbean) and Vauxhall (GM cars). As if studying and freelancing didn’t keep me busy enough, I had the good fortune to be chosen as one of forty artists to participate in the Ecover recycled billboard project. But my efforts really began to pay off, when in 1990, I won the Iggesund Paperboard Silver Tree Award. This resulted in a once-in-a-lifetime visit to Lapland for me, along with three other winners from the UK, 4 designers from Germany and 4 from France. But after graduation, reality began to set in, so I put graphic design on the back burner, and worked in retail for nearly a decade.

​