Naomi’s Story
My Grandma always has a jam-jar full of brushes and turps. I clearly remember, aged 3, that I was going to get a jam-jar of my very own.
I left home at 17 with the self-belief and stupidity that only that age brings. By 19, I had won my first art award and started painting and selling prolifically. Enormous portraits of fashionistas, neon flooded bowling alleys, Glastonbury high wire acts, larger than life paintings of whatever was in my fridge or moulding away in the fruit bowl...endless, wonderful days full of painting. I married a writer and had two boys. Things just got better and better with one-man shows, Champagne with red currants, tiny food, women with red soled stilettos and everyone named 'darling'.
Then my tiny, beautiful boy got ill and everything changed. Max slept in stripy red and white PJ's which made his blue lips look so strange when we found him in bed that night. Max had had his first seizure. After the ambulances, the consultants and the tests, Max was diagnosed with a life-threatening form of epilepsy. The learning disabilities and autism would come later.
Looking after him became all I did. I tried to paint for a while but the canvases had lost whatever it was they had. I was almost as if I could hide what I felt from everyone but not from my canvas. I put my brushes and jam jar away. As the years passed, Max stabilised and I started swapping tips and ideas that had helped Max with other parents who had disabled children. This grew into a Facebook page, then a website and eventually into a charity called Sky Badger. I named it after Max's superhero alter ego. By 2022, Sky Badger had helped over 2.8 million families in the UK. I even ended up getting an OBE which was a total blast. Painting was simply a distant memory.
I divorced my writer and met a charming man a year later. On a rainy afternoon in November, I sat with my charming man in a Dublin bar. He said he had a present for me and handed me a sketchbook and pencil announcing that there would be no more conversation until I had done a sketch. Livid, having not drawn for a decade, I drew the scene in front of me and it all came back, like the taste of chocolate, like an old friend. That day I fell in love with drawing again as well as that charming man, who I then of course married.
In 2021 I went back to painting full time. Cobwebs dusting off and painting selling well. I'm now a hopeful 49 year old rather than a ridiculous 17 year old. I'm ready to see where painting takes me this time around, fingers and toes crossed.
