Naomi Rae

Growing up in an artistic family in the thriving art colony of St Ives in Cornwall, drawing and
painting has always been a part of my life. Taught by my grandfather, father and uncle, my
earliest memories involve a sketchbook and pencil, canvas and palette knife, painting and
sketching along the cliffs of the West Penwith peninsula.
A move from Cornwall to the diverse and unfamiliar landscape of New Zealand in my late
twenties brought fresh inspiration and a new focus and on my return to St Ives a few years
later, I set up my studio and began painting full time.
My work from this period in Cornwall was purely abstract; acrylic on canvas applied impasto
style, creating vivid and highly textured pieces. Whilst a direct response to the landscape
around me, these paintings focused more on colour and form than a sense of place. A
decade later, a move to the rolling South Downs in West Sussex, saw a dramatic shift in my
work to smaller, figurative, monochromatic studies in Indian ... [more]