Writing

Mooching around a gallery is my favourite way to spend an afternoon and writing a novel set in the art world gave me carte blanche to visit every exhibition and spend hours with enormous art books.

I had seen Barbara Hepworth’s retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2015 and something about the small scale and smooth surface of her sculptures that lodged in my brain. From doves to amorphous marble shapes, they were all eminently strokable and portable enough to carry home.

Once I discovered that Hepworth was a working mother and had been abandoned, albeit briefly, by her partner after giving birth to triplets, I was captivated.

It was the 1930s and Barbara was in an open relationship with Ben Nicholson. When he returned to his wife and other children in Paris, Barbara was left alone with three babies in a basement with a cracked window and a dodgy boiler. How did she even find time to get dressed let alone sketch or paint?Her talent and strength in adversity astonished me. 

I set the action of Painting by Numbers in the 1970s, when Shirley Conran pronounced that life was too short to stuff a mushroom, but society still expected wives and mothers to put their family first.

Margot, the wife and mother in my novel, manages to create intricate pictures in tiny increments of time - while trying not to overshadow her husband. But when her talent is recognised, their family life implodes.