I was born in Warsaw, Poland and raised in a weatherboard cottage in a working-class suburb. This provided me with a sheer determination to succeed with my personal love for art and beauty.

I am occasionally asked by friends or new acquaintances who are impressed with my works, what has inspired me when did I start to draw or paint?

I have often thought very deeply about this as I have vivid memories of my childhood and growing up. I would have to say that when I was around four years of age, watching“Mr. Quiggle” on ABC television would have been my first fascination with lines and strokes.

Watching this puppet with a pencil for a nose, who would start off with a line, or a curve, and then continue to complete what was a very simplistic illustration extremely basic, was very impressionable to a four-year-old. I remember being very excited when my mother bought me a pack of six small, coloured pencils. I was fascinated by colours and I would be given the white sheet of butcher’s paper in which our meat had been wrapped to draw on.

I drew stick people with curly hair and eventually taught myself to draw basic legs, arms, hands, and feet. I also taught myself to add blue and yellow to make green, and red and white to make pink.

Another creative passion I had at this age was to look in the gutters and on the footpath in our street for chips of broken glass; all different colors.

My family didn’t know about this but I would store them in a secret hiding place beneath the front steps of our house and each day when my mother was having a rest, I would go and visit my “secret stash of jewels” and marvel at the different colours and how they would shine with sparkles when held beneath the sunlight.

All this was pretty exciting for a little girl who was becoming creative, but of course, I had no idea what was to come.I was also fascinated by Walt Disney characters. I would copy them, color them and feel very proud of my results. Then I advanced to drawing Charles’ Schulz’ comic charactersCharlie Brown and Snoopy.

The personalities of these two captured my heart. On Saturday afternoons our black and white television there was a programme called “WildKingdom”. I would be riveted in and watching it and I believe that is where my love of nature and my fascination of the diversity of birds and animals commenced.

And, for more than 25 years now, Sir David Attenborough’s documentaries continue to capture my imagination.

When I started Primary School, I remember my teacher handing each child a brightly colored square of paper, announcing that she was going to teach us to draw “stick people” on the paper. Well, I knew what they looked like but I had already graduated to drawing elongated oval-shaped legs and arms.

So she drew a stick lady with a triangular dress on the blackboard. Well, I drew my interpretation of a lady with limbs, curly hair, hands, and feet; the face with a smile. When my teacher saw it she yelled at me and became very angry. I had absolutely no idea what she meant because I felt proud of my drawing of a “complete person”.

One of the other teachers came into the room to find out what was going on. My teacher promptly showed the other teacher what I had done. The other teacher, Mrs Black, then looked at me and asked me to follow her into her classroom.

Her room had the cane in it, and I thought I was in dire straits, however she told me how proud of me she was, and promptly picked up a jar of jelly beans and toldme to take a handful.

Receiving that praise was the true beginning of belief in myself that I was good at drawing, and as the years went by, I developed a passion for more colours and textures, and nature.

The green tree frogs and silvery-eye birds that ate our figs from the figtree, and the grass suddenly becoming greener after the rain - these are just a few images I so vividly remember.

I also remember the colouring competitions (on the back of cereal boxes and peanut paste labels), which I would enter, and win! This was more recognition that my creations were good. So throughout the years, with this encouragement, I developed a style of my own, always spending heaps of time to make my images as “perfect” as I could.

Now I plan to start promoting my creations and to finally be able to spend time doing what I love the most - painting the beauty of nature, with all of its splendour and perfection – fulfillingmy dreams and goals for my art and my passion for nature.

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• art
• painting
• drawing
• creativity
• nature