Hi, I'm Louise and I'm passionate about nature - birds and trees especially.

When I was little the outdoors was a place of enchantment and mystery and I wanted to be in it all of the time. For many years I travelled and worked throughout Europe, trying my hand at various jobs and my favourite were always the ones where I was living outside: shepherding in the mountains of Southern France and on the Fjords of Norway, or having my hands in clay whilst apprenticing to a ceramic artist in Crete, and living in a bamboo hut with the elements sweeping through day and night. These experiences, and many others, made a deep impression on me.

I started painting in 2017 because I couldn't NOT paint any longer. I was always ignoring the impulse to paint, after all what was I going to paint and how on earth did I go about doing it? I didn't have a clue, I hadn't held a paintbrush since I was at school. I'd bought some tubes of paint a few years before but applying them to a canvas was beyond me.

At the beginning of January that year, I was curled up on the sofa reading when I heard a Tawny Owl calling in the garden. The garden was enormous, mostly wild, with very old trees and I stood at the back door trying to see him. I wrapped myself in a blanket and made my way across the lawn and into the wild of the garden. I followed the song and spied him high up in the trees and sillhouetted by the moon. And time stopped. Just like that. Something happened in that moment and when I came back indoors I wasn't the same. I knew I had to paint that scene the next day, I did, and I haven't looked back.

This is now my vocation and I especially love making the paintings into cards so that they're affordable art and can travel all over the world.

For more information about my art and to see what I’m currently up to visit my instagram account @louisefordhamart or my website: www.louisefordhamart.com