Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul. ~Alice Walker

Summer wildflowers by Mary Dipnall

Mary Dipnall says that she would rather be sitting in a meadow full of wild flowers, sketching with the sun on her back than anywhere else. 

Born in Portsmouth in 1936, her childhood and subsequent painting style was much influenced by family picnics and holidays in England’s beautiful West Country. Perhaps it is Mary Dipnall’s lack of formal art training or her pastoral lifestyle which infuses her work with such colourful freedom and warmth. Whatever it is that makes her work inspired, it strikes a chord with all those who love and value the English countryside. Following her marriage and the birth of her two sons, Mary Dipnall found herself turning to painting full time, rediscovering her love for the natural world through her paintings. She gradually began to specialise in wonderful representations of wild flowers, and in 1980 held her first exhibition in London. Since then, Mary Dipnall has exhibited on a regular basis in Great Britain, such is the demand for her original work. Her distinctive style of painting guarantees an unique, colourful and decorative quality in each of her startling paintings.

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul…

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

— Emily Dickinson

Every soul has strings for someone’s only fingers .

Unless someone can look into the core of your heart and see the degree of your passions or look into the depth of your soul and see the extent of your will…

“Unless someone can look into the core of your heart and see the degree of your passions or look into the depth of your soul and see the extent of your will, then they have no business telling you what you can and cannot achieve. Because they may know the odds but they do not know you.”

-Sandra King

I’ve listened: and all the sounds I heard Were music,—wind, and stream, and bird…

I’ve listened: and all the sounds I heard
Were music,—wind, and stream, and bird.
With youth who sang from hill to hill
I’ve listened: my heart is hungry still.

I’ve looked: the morning world was green;
Bright roofs and towers of town I’ve seen;
And stars, wheeling through wingless night.
I’ve looked: and my soul yet longs for light.

I’ve thought: but in my sense survives
Only the impulse of those lives
That were my making. Hear me say
‘I’ve thought!’—and darkness hides my day.

Siegfried Sassoon

I put my heart and soul into my work…

and I have lost my mind in the process.

— Vincent van Gogh

Meet me in corridor of your soul…

Invite me to the hidden chambers.

Show me the light behind your eyes.

Teach me the rhythm of your blood.

You are the secret I crave to discover.

– Dean Jackson