Meet the Correspondents - Maree Clarkson

Hi, I'm Maree Clarkson and first a thank you to Cathy for inviting me to join 'Sketching in Nature'. It really is a wonderful honour. Kate seems to have an endless amount of energy sketching, painting, running various blogs, promoting her CD's (which are wonderful, by the way - I can recommend that you try one!), her offerings on eBay, her support of Breast Cancer and I'm sure much more I don't even know about! Great work Kate!

I live on an 8.5ha smallholding in the countryside in Tarlton, Gauteng, South Africa, about 50km from Johannesburg, together with my husband Dave, our Fox terrier x Jacko, and a menagerie of other animals. My passions are sketching and painting, nature, the beach, crystals, useless information, technology, my MAC, my Landrover, gardening and discovering anything new in life.

We run our business from home, selling tractors, tractor spares and classic and vintage cars, like Austin Healey, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Morgan, Triumph, etc., which is my husband's passion.

I have been sketching and painting and tending to animals for as long as I can remember.

I am a self-taught watercolourist and haven't had any formal art training apart from a couple of semesters of art in high school in the ninth grade, but paint what I feel and see from my inner being. Sketching and painting is part of my daily life, like brushing teeth.

Looking back at some old paintings, I realised that I only took up the brush again in 1985, and then only sporadically. It was only in 2001 that sketching and painting became a solid and regular part of my life again.


'Shed and Birdhouse' watercolour in Moleskine Watercolour Notebook

About two years ago I discovered blogging and networking and it seemed like a perfect outlet for my creativity, to be seen, to be heard and to be recognised. This year I have been painting, sketching and blogging daily and can't seem to tire of it! I post my artwork on my blog ART & CREATIVITY and I also keep a Nature Journal at HEDGIE'S JOY! and THE BUSINESS OF BLISS is where I chat about how blissful life can be.

My tagline is "There is a fine line between dreams and reality; it's up to you to draw it."

Regards,