Heather Blanchard

Heather was born & spent her childhood in the West Midlands. After attending Wolverhampton & Chelsea Schools of Art, she spent her early career as a successful textile designer, based in London but selling work mainly in Japan & the USA, & also working as a part-time lecturer at Southend School of Art. In the 1980s Heather gave up teaching to form a partnership to concentrate on interior design, exhibition design & hand printed wallpapers. The past twenty five years have been spent concentrating mainly on painting & she has had many successful exhibitions in Essex, Suffolk, Shropshire, Wales, all over Cumbria & now in Scotland.

Heather has been a participant in Dumfries & Galloway’s Spring Fling for the past 5 years & she has been both a prize winner & judge in the ‘Cumbrian Open’. Heather has also found the time to illustrate a number of educational publications.

Heather’s work is predominantly landscapes & seascapes in oils, although she does occasionally work in mixed media on paper. Her studio is spacious enough to accommodate screen printing equipment & she has now begun to make some limited edition prints.

Although ‘take your breath away’ landscapes always excite Heather, it’s often the minutiae in the surrounding countryside that inspire her to paint. The brilliant patterns that nature reveals to us never ceases to amaze Heather; ‘I walk past the same lanes, trees & gates day in & day out & then, on occasion, the light or weather conditions are such that things that had not caught my attention much before suddenly provoke & encourage me.’