Artist LC

 The flower palate here is very limited, but I find the triangular pattern that the flowers make, give a pleasing look to this picture of Chrysanthemums. It encourages me to return to pastelling flowers when my ability to hold the pastel returns. It feels good to draw in a range of styles with a range of subjects. I am limited to my choice, to an extent, by being home bound. As Spring comes on, more flowers will open up in my beautiful cottage garden giving me more opportunity to explore them.

To me the eyes are the most important thing to get right. They convey so much of the person. I love to do portraits because of the expression which is ever changing. A face never stays the same, even though the features are consistent. There are so many different nuances and looks.I find it so interesting to study a face whether a dog or a person. They all have their own unique moments to try and capture

  This poster art 2017 was designed by my husband Greg, to accompany one of his songs  (   https://gregcrowhurst.bandcamp.com/track/give-us-hope .   The art work is a pastel self-portrait I had drawn. It highlights the starkness of a pain-filled half empty paralysed body, illustrated by the shadow.it also illustrates the strength and hope of each new day

We just heard that my husband won the Wondershare Claim Your Space Challenge with the video More than Pain, about my art, which gave me great confidence and affirmed me as an artist, despite profound disability.. We are so happy that it won, but sadly, we have been struggling with the level of disability severity recently and we did not see the message that it it had won. Safly it is now too late to claim the prize. But it’s a great statement about his video skill and my art/my life! https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Q8Su2vxE2LQ&feature=youtu.be

I struggle to convey my experience. So many efforts to convey it down the years.  I had hoped to be able to do more pastels. I really love them, their feel, the colours, the clarity and detail they bring. The joy of my fingers smudging them on the paper. I seem to be addicted to looking for more different sorts of pastel to try, yet in truth I have more than I could ever use.  This love, this desire to get the right colour also drives me. I find it so hard despite a really great choice of quality pastels, to find just the right colour when I draw my corgi. Up at 2am last night with insomnia, I could not help but purchase a small set of burnt sienna shades. Fingers crossed they will help me get a more accurate colour. Yet I fear  my next drawing will have to wait, maybe days, more likely weeks, even months or longer. Instead it must suffice that I stroke the screen with one finger and continue to express the inexpressible anyway that I can. For to not express it is to comp...

  I am proud  and honoured to say this pastel was featured in an article about my art in a New York Disabled Artist Network Newsletter, thanks to my dear friend Sanda Aronson, who started the Disabled Artist Network in 1985. She asked me to share some of my art in August 2011. She dedicated a whole edition to me, for which I was beyond delighted and moved that she would like my work. This piece is about the continuous head pain I have endured for 30 years and the intensity of the throbbing headache that I repeatedly experience on top. The pain is disabling. The red pastel conveys some of the pain I feel, pain all around, not just inside my head. I just found an old email that described how doing the pastel had given me a worse headache. I came across it the other day looking through my earlier work. It was all very beautifully laid out. I felt it was a real recognition of me as an artist.

 I named this picture Lost because it is exactly how I felt. I had lost my awareness, my ability to tolerate anyone in the room with me. My mind was gone. My memory reduced or non existent.  I do not remember exactly what date I did this pastel. It is at least 12 years ago though if not longer. I do remember making it though.  I was in a greatly deteriorated cognitive state and having worked on the pastel for days, over weeks and months, to get an accurate picture, I was so blank and diminished visually that I could not do any fine detail, so it seemed that the only thing I could do was take a pastel and swoosh it across my portrait, to try and depict the devastation in my head.  I felt sad on the one hand to seemingly destroy a portrait of myself in this way, that had taken so long to create, but I could barely focus or see. I could not think. I could not understand incoming information. This remains true today, though it comes and goes a little more now, so that I ...