My grandmother lived in Corfu in the famous Liston, a multi storey building built in 1807 by the French during the Napoleonic period.

She lived on the top level and my mother grew up there. When I went to live in Greece this was my home too as was my Grandmother’s love and nurturing heart, she was my family’s angel. I painted this interior of her bedroom and all the objects I remembered and of course the view of the old fortress. This was a paradise hard to describe but easier to paint.

The swallows had their nests in the roof and because her home was at the very top, swallows and pigeons were always part of the world outside her window as were the sea and the sky.

I painted this in her honour less than a year before she passed away and sent her a photo of it when I had finished it. Eventually I gave it to my mother and now it is back with me again; a family heirloom painted in a style that was used for depictions of the sacred, doorway to healing miracles and the spiritual world.

I could have gone on to paint endless themes of my choosing in this style, some even expected it of me, but I painted less than a dozen before I started to need a freer form of expression. However, the sense that the artworks can have a power within them, independent of me, continued.

This is the first audio-visual story I recorded In my own words :