My Mother’s Paint Box

Rolled round my tongue from early years, these words;

Prussian, Gamboge, Vermillion

Ultramarine from over the seas.

You smiled at my talk of Yellow Ogres 

Stalking across the Burnt Sienna, 

Told me tales of mango-leaf fed cows,

enslaved to the colour Yellow.

In powdery Cobalt I painted a bridge 

Re-stirring that lurch of our Austin 7 down the Lichfield Road

With its alchemic mix of excitement and fear.

You named the serious poison mined for that jewel shade

Payne’s Grey was your favourite,

For misty, mutable light, rain and melting clouds, 

But when black was vital 

We mixed the primaries

To a host of relative darks.

My mother, Vera, an art teacher and keen amateur painter, died in 1986 just prior to my beginning on the Sheffield Art Therapy training programme. She always encouraged my painting, drawing and interest in the history of art, and her interest in arts and wellbeing was formative in my life. 

I inherited her travelling paint box which reminds me of her encouragement to always be ready to make art.

Laura Richardson was born in Walsall in the West Midlands, and studied English and American Literature at the University of East Anglia. Following a period of working in a collective and as a volunteer counsellor in Oxford she came to Sheffield to study art therapy in 1987. She also holds a BA in Fine Art, and an MA in art psychotherapy research. She has worked in Sheffield in the voluntary sector with children and families, in the Social Services mental health day service, and for 26 years in the NHS mental health service before retiring in December 2017