My love of the animals of the hearth, the field and hill (and the wildflower meadows that delight their discoverer) come from my years of living on and making our living from a smallholding in wild west Wales.
My husband and I gave up our successful careers in finance in our mid-twenties and with only the experience of keeping a tankful of tropical fish purchased a 500 year old smallholding and spent 18 months renovating it – having never even changed a tap washer before!
Then we set about getting our livestock; two Jersey in-calf cows to be hand-milked, 6 goats, a small flock of black-faced sheep, 2 breeding sows (one of them a Gloucester Old Spot) and about 100 chickens, ducks and geese. We eventually added breeding rabbits and 5 hives of bees and our life was perfect.
We made our living by throwing our lovely home open to guests all year round, mainly families with young children who came for 1 or 2 weeks (and returned again and again with other families so, they too, could have this experience of a lifetime).
We showed the children how to collect eggs and taught them how to hand-milk a goat (and for the calmer children and adults, how to hand-milk our most gentle cow).
I made butter, hard and soft chesses and yoghurt from our milk and bacon from our own pigs and our life was perfect.
But then my husband, at just 32, fell ill with an incurable disease (that, if it hadn't taken 24 years to diagnose, might not have been incurable) and though he tried to work on we couldn't keep the farm going and so we lost it.
But I had been drawing and painting from a young child and so today I draw and paint the perfect dream that we once lived and I paint it with a passion. I would paint even if nobody liked what I did but I am lucky in that people seem to and honour me by purchasing my art and hanging it on the walls of their homes. And I am deeply touched by that and so now our life feels nearly perfect.
I hope you enjoy what I put all my love, my heart and my longing into,
Pat
Patricia Bullen-Whatling BA Fine Art (Hons)
PBWGallery.com
** If you'd like to see examples of my latest art (much of which doesn't get published to Facebook or my online gallery) you can easily find out more here if you haven't registered already >>
http://patbullenwhatlinggallery.co.uk/lp04-webpage_signup.html
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