It's all for art's sake (From Gazette & Herald)

It's all for art's sake

IMAGINE giving up your job, your home - all to pursue a career as an artist.

It may sound daunting but that's what Anne Lumb is doing.

Last month, she set up her business, Wood Dragon Arts, at the Helmsley Walled Garden, but she says it wasn't just something she wanted to do - it was something she had to do.

"I just got to a place in my life where there was absolutely nothing else that I wanted to do except this," she said.

"Life's too short to do a job that you don't enjoy. I believe in following your bliss - and persistence and hard work will get you there."

Art may have been something Anne always wanted to pursue for a living, but it's taken a lot to get things off the ground.

"I've had kangaroo petrol with it," she said, referring to the stop-start way things have gone over the years, but that stuttering came to an end when she finally decided to set up her own business.

The road to becoming a professional artist hasn't been a straightforward one for Anne. After leaving school, she studied art at college - mostly ceramics and sculpture, but found her way into the restaurant trade.

In 1986, she made a break from that, going into nursing, a route that finally led her to work in psychotherapy - but wherever her work led her, her artistic spirit was always at her shoulder.

She said: "Through all my other jobs, it's always been an influence. When I was waitressing, I used to design all the menus. When I was working in mental health, I used to run art groups with the patients. I've always found wherever I've worked, people have always found out that I could do this."

Her training and work in counselling and psychotherapy also involved undertaking therapy herself, which is a compulsory and vital part of the training - and one which has had lasting effects for her.

"It was more of a personal adventure for me," she said. "It was an exploration that has really deepened my artwork."

Added to all of that, Anne also writes on the healing properties of trees in a monthly newsletter, Herbal Health and Healing Hands, available on the internet at www.ewta.co.uk or www.eastwestpublications.com.

Anne - who was brought up in Pickering and Rosedale - stages her first major exhibition soon. Her work - which includes paintings and embroidery, as well as combinations of the two - will go on show at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough from April 25 to May 25. Many of the picture frames - made from a North African wood called Obeche - will also have had Anne's designs burned into them, using a process called pyrography.

"It will be lovely to see all my work together in one place. It will be a stepping stone towards gettting myself more well-known."

As well as setting up the business in Helmsley, Anne - who has lived in Scarborough for 15 years, will be looking to move to the area with her husband Stephen and eight-year-old son Timothy.

In the last two years, Anne has started working on landscape pictures, and her images are often based on pictures taken on photographic expeditions around the North Yorkshire Moors.

But much of her more mythological work was first inspired by a trip to a Pickering gallery. She said: "I really love the Green Man image. I first saw it when I was actually visiting the Green Man Gallery in Pickering. That was about ten years ago now.

"I really liked the name and the gallery's logo and it inspired me to find out more."

Despite being brought up in the North York Moors, one of the biggest influences on Anne's work is Celtic mythology. But Anne is also searching for more information about Yorkshire's own long-lost tribe of Celts, which formed the powerful kingdom of Brigantia.

She said: "I'm wanting to explore more of the Yorkshire Celtic influence. I want to find out more about the Brigantia tribe."

The kingdom of Brigantia was formed over 2,000 years ago, in the Iron Age, when a group of minor tribes banded together under the warlike Brigantes to rule an area stretching across the north of England - from the Mersey as far as the Scottish Borders.

Other sources of inspiration include the Celtic Ogham script, a form of writing using straight or diagonal marks through a line which originated in Ireland before 400AD.

"For the landscape pictures I do, I want peole to feel they can go off and have a picnic behind a gate in a picture, but for the mythological stuff, I just try to set off the imagination. In the hustle and bustle of life, it is just a moment where they can stop and be transported away from it all."

Visitors wanting to be whisked away to a world of Green Men, ancient Irish writing and lost tribes can find the departure point at Anne's studio, Wood Dragon Arts, at Helmsley Walled Garden.

Updated: 11:24 Thursday, April 18, 2002