Catching Sparkles | Artcard

‘I won my first art competition aged 7; the prize was a packet of Smarties.  In secondary school, Mrs J______, my art teacher, introduced me to the French Impressionists.

They captured the fleeting moment, often leaving the dark studio to paint directly in nature. They called it ‘en plein air’.  They prioritised emotional truth and sensory experience over polished, academic perfection.  The Impressionists showed me that meaning doesn't always require precision; sometimes it lives in colour, texture, the gesture of a moment, resisting tidy articulation. That early influence stayed with me, though I didn't recognise it for decades….

Years later, sitting with leaders who could name their targets but not their experience, I felt the same inadequacy of language I'd known as a child moving between schools.

Painting offered what conversation alone could not, a way to hold complexity, contradiction, and the unsaid on a single surface. Slowly, art moved from something I could do into something I worked with: a companion to my coaching, a way of making the invisible visible.’

Catching Sparkles | Postcard 1

So many of our clients have told me that they met something important about themselves when they put paint on the page. We’ve laughed and cried together as their stories have emerged. And when they’ve got paint on their suit.

Meeting. Beyond Words