DARBYSHIRE, Pippa

1950 - ?

Philippa Sally Elizabeth Darbyshire was born in Malaysia in November 1950, her father was Scottish and an officer in the Royal Marines, so she spent her formative years travelling the world and always lived close to the sea, spending most of her later life in training, performing, and teaching ballet and dance. Pippa started her art career late in life but had always painted as a hobby and later worked on furniture and murals. After her first career and having two children, at the age of forty she studied at Ipswich School of Art and then took a degree at Norwich School of Art. In 1990, she opened her own art gallery with a small private art school at Felixstowe, Suffolk and at the same time taught Life Drawing on the degree course at University Campus Suffolk in Ipswich under Ken Back, who had been her tutor. She married at Ipswich in 1987, Peter Stephen Cooke but still paints under the name of Pippa Darbyshire. In 2001, Pippa and her husband Peter moved to France and opened her second art gallery 'Relais de la Baie' in Noyelles-sur-Meras, a platform for selling her own work. Its success marked a turning point in her art career as she lived and works in Noyelles-sur-mer, on the estuary of the river Somme where she painted mostly seascapes of the local bay for some 20 years, until they sold the gallery in 2019. Pippa and her husband have now purchased a flat in Margate where she had her first exhibition in September 2019. They have retained a cottage in Noyelles in France where she has her main studio, so she is working and exhibiting on both sides of the channel. Pippa paints her surrounding country and seaside from her van or in her studio from detailed drawings, measurements, and notes. Her paintings are figurative tending towards abstraction and vary in size from miniature to extremely large canvases. She has had several solo exhibitions in Suffolk as well as in London and France.
Website: https://pippadarbyshire.com

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Works by This Artist