Tracy Hall

Painting a Picture

Tracy Hall, watercolourist, tells us about working from home, raising a family and being an artist on Orkney...

After coming to Orkney to visit family, Tracy Hall became a permanent resident raising her children in an idyllic house beside the sea with husband Jim.

"I was born in Cornwall, but my parents came up to Orkney and I came up on holiday. I met Jim my husband and that was 21 years ago now.

"When I first came up here I had a knitwear business, doing hand knits. When I had kids I stopped that and started painting again. It was really for my own pleasure that I started it as I hadn’t really painted since art school.

"Then through word of mouth people locally started asking me to paint things for them. I sold my work in the local Fossil Centre. The lady that ran it was really kind and would show any pictures I brought her. It started really small, but is more or less full time now.

"There is a growing artistic community in Orkney which is great because you can take it or leave it. I don't have a lot to do with it but that's just me. Most of my work now comes from outside the islands. People really do like to buy original art in Orkney, which means there is a good viable market to help artists make a living. There are also quite a few galleries here where artists can sell their work.

"Just about all of my work comes through my website. It has been the turning point between doing it as a hobby and making a viable business of it. The website means you can be at home with the kids, you don't have to travel, it's all there for you. Plus people are coming to you from a worldwide audience.

"You can have a great lifestyle here in Orkney working from home. Thanks to the internet you have a world-wide customer base at your fingertips. It makes no difference to me where my orders come from, I just take the finished piece down to the post office and off it goes. I can email people pictures too, showing them how the painting is progressing. I'll come up with a composition they like and the beauty of the internet is you can show it to them and discuss what they want without having to travel to meet the client every time.

"I actually work mainly on commissions nowadays. I don't have time to put work together to do an exhibition at the moment. People seem to like wildlife, flowers and scenes from country life – basically what I see around me everyday.

"If it's a pet portrait, they send me photos to work from. We also grow lots of flowers here or if people want something harder to come by I go to a specialist nursery to find it.

"Although I've done lots of pet and animal pictures, people visiting Orkney really seem to like puffins! I sell a lot of prints and cards as well.

"I do quite a bit of licensed work too. I’ve recently done a series of pictures for a jigsaw company – Border collies sitting in front of an Aga cooker, a farmyard with hens and so on. I am also working on the illustrations for a book about the birdlife in the islands with author Tim Dean which will be published in 2008. There is so much inspiration around me which I try to capture in my work."

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