BREAKING THE RULES
Recollecting how she first picked up a brush in her mid-forties after recovering from an encounter with the big ‘C’, Jan Thomson says “My journey into the world of painting began late. It was then that I decided that life is far too short to delay doing what you love, so I gave up my house painting job of 17 years and took up slightly smaller brushes.”
With a number of artists in the family, Jan says art was always in her blood. Why she avoided it for 47 years she didn’t say but once she started she was instantly and totally hooked. “I started with watercolours and then moved onto oils,” she reveals. “I learnt to paint by going out to Wellington’s (sometimes wild) south coast, wrestling with the elements and trying to put down on paper what was in front of me.”