Painting with Both Hands: Sophie Walbeoffe

Description

Tracing her first paintings as a teenager, through art school and the struggles starting out as an unknown painter, painting Native Americans on the bitter streets of Nanaimo, through the baking tradewinds of the Middle East and Africa. The book illustrates Sophie's long career painting on site in the deserts surrounded by camels, wild people and exotic beasts; rearing her two young children in the African bush. Her yearning for home and other climes enriches the book with images of her Devon roots, the freshness of Italy, Spain and France, the colour of India and the history of Jerusalem. Wherever she travels she draws a crowd as she paints with both hands.

Sophie Walbeoffe graduated from Wimbledon School of Art where she was tutored by Maggie Hambling, Christopher Lebrun, Neil Bally and Martin Fuller. She studied under Cecil Collins where she learnt to paint with two hands. Sophie Walbeoffe is an established travel painter travelling and living in Dubai and Canada in the mid eighties. In 1987 Sophie joined Operation Raleigh expedition to Kenya as the official artist, met and married Dr Piers Simpkin and his herd of 60 camels lives there twenty five years later with two children Lara and Jasper. She has painted some curious people: Jimmy John, Wilfred Thesiger, the Emir of Sharja on his death bed and many other nomads. Sophie has painted in Syria, Jordan, India, Spain, France and spent 3 years living in a studio in the Old City, Jerusalem. With over thirty one woman exhibitions to date she is still living in Kenya, where she has a studio and is illustrating a book "Lamu - an artists impression" and helping her daughter start her new Polka Dot gallery in Nairobi, meanwhile her husband's sixty camels and their traditional herder's still model for her paintings. Edward Lucie-Smith is generally regarded as the most prolific and the most widely published writer on art. A number of his art books, among them Movements in Art since 1945, Visual Arts of the 20th Century, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today are used as standard texts throughout the world. Ian Strathcarron is the author of the travel biographies Vasco da Gama's Grand Crusade, Joy Unconfined! Lord Byron's Grand Tour Retoured, the Mark Twain travel trilogy Innocence and War, The Indian Equator and Mississippi Mayhem and the philosophy works Living with Life and Mysticism and Bliss. He is also Chairman of Unicorn Publishing Group and a mediator with the cultural property ADR service Art Resolve Ltd.