Artists website www.kirsteen.art

I have launched a new website to view, like, share and buy my art!

See it here:
https://www.kirsteen.art

Original artwork by Kirsteen Lyons-Benson (BA Hons)
Mixed media on paper.

Kirsteen Lyons is the child of two artists who met at Glasgow art school in the sixties, got married, and fled the city to a remote Scottish island, to live on a beach, in a tent, with two kittens and a chest of drawers.

Growing up in a craft pottery, and later a cottage in the woods, Kirsteen planned to rebel, and have central heating and breakdown cover when she grew up!

Grow up she did, and studied textile design, not fine art (more rebellion). She did very well at university winning two prestigious competitions and getting a job with Muraspec (a wallpaper manufacturer) straight out of uni, it was new product development, so she went from there to other innovation companies,
and tried all sorts of middle class ideas out, including paying a mortgage, and working in PR, but soon found her parents were correct - they are very overrated ideas.

Kirsteen tried selling paintings on line, London markets, starting and running a craft fair, starting a gallery and pottery, starting and running a face painting business, and finally returned to textile design to freelance from home, and be mum to a daughter and a son.

After designing fashion fabrics for Amanda Kelly Design Studios for a few years, she has recently made the switch back to interior fabrics and wallpaper and signed with an established and prestigious studio in Europe.

She has now fully come to terms with her hippy origins and feels she belongs in middle class suburban England like a Bengal tiger belongs on a water slide! For this reason Kirsteen spent the last two years travelling Spain, France and Portugal on a camper van!

Kirsteen creates original paintings inspired by nature and travel. She has painted and designed all her life, at no time is she more herself than with brush in hand, or a sticky juice carton and shoes belonging to her kids! 😂💙🎨✏️

Contact info:
Kirsteen Lyons (BA Hons)
+44 7799201417
kirsteenann@gmail.com
Facebook:
https://m.facebook.com/KirsteenBenson
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/artdreamsgallery

Youtube:
https://m.youtube.com/user/kirsteenartwork/videos

Blogs:

Art:
http://createadrawingaday.blogspot.co.uk

Textile design:
http://enchantedtextiledesign.blogspot.co.uk

Read about my travel and some artwork:
http://feelcreaterepeat.blogspot.com

Kids art projects:
http://artistmummy.blogspot.co.uk

KIRSTEEN LYONS BA (HONS) CV

KIRSTEEN LYONS BA (HONS)

Recent Freelance:

Currently founding: Art Dreams Gallery. An online gallery bringing together the work of four professional artists to sell original paintings and some prints. https://www.etsy.com/shop/ArtDreamsGallery

2013 to present. Freelance as Enchanted Textile Design. Creating high quality design for a series of textile studioes in New York, London and Europe. Currently designing furnishing fabrics which are sold to clients throughout Europe. http://enchantedtextiledesign.blogspot.com

2006 to 2009 Started and ran Bagsythat pottery and Gallery in Tilgate Park, Crawley. A small pottery and Gallery providing handmade ceramics, teaching, painting and children's activities.

2008 to 2013 Started, ran and eventually sold Crawley Craft Fair. A vibrant community event and a viable small business. (I also advised on the founding of Crawley Book Fair.)

2008 to 2013 Started and ran Butterfly Facepainting. Butterfly Facepainting was a successful and creative Facepainting business with up to four facepainters freelancing under my management.

Competitions:

2001 First prize-winner of an industrial competition for Morton Yong & Borland. This was a prize for the best of Madras lace design and involved one week’s work placement gaining first-hand experience of designing Madras lace converting it into a suitable format for the computerised loom and seeing it woven. I was also involved in preparations for a trade fair the company were attending.

2001 Joint first prize-winner of an industrial competition for Muraspec, (a textile wall coverings design and manufacturer). The judges of this competition said I had won for the relevance and applicability of my response to the brief as well as the high standard of work, commenting “There are people out there making good livings with far inferior products”.

Qualifications:

1999-2002 BA (Hons) Textile Design 2(1). Involving; print, weave, knit, marketing, finance, management, coloration Technology, print technology, visual studies, professional practice, CAD and the design process. Also being entered into the Royal Society of Arts textile competition.

A level art, A level photography, Several GCSE's.

Work history:

2007 to 2008 teaching English as a second language at Greenfields English language school.

2006 Freelance Graphic design and fine art. Selling paintings online and at fairs.

2004-2005 Graphic Design and PR. Star Syringe. This involved web updates, Newsletters, brochures and press articles. During my time at Star Syringe I instigated many press articles including national radio interviews and national newspapers. I was also instrumental in winning several award for the Business including the Sussex Business awards and Best international Company at the Stivies. (International Bussiness awards baced in the US, This put us on US TV.) See www.starsyringe.com for more detail.

2003 Freelance Murals and wedding stationary.

2002 Associate, Product development. Muraspec. (Kent) This involved lending my textiles knowledge to the team, research, planning, lab work and CAD design for 3D weave.

1996-1999 Art and drama teacher at Greenfields school, (Sussex). In addition to teaching lessons this involved assisting with school plays, attending moderation meetings, parents’ evenings, planning lessons, keeping admin, supervision duties around the school, writing reports and communicating with parents about the progress their children made.

1996-2001 Theatre Design and production. (Sussex) I have designed and created; costumes, props, scenery and backdrops for several theatre productions as well as acting, coaching and directing.

1998-1999 Commissions to paint murals. (Sussex and Kent).

2001 Work placement with The Printed Stitch Studio Design Consultants. (Galashiels) During my time in Printed Stitch, I worked on two main design projects. The first was compiling ideas to employ textile art in a shopping mall in Edinburgh. I’d also worked on designing their new promotion mail and business card.

Volunteer Work:

2014 and 2015 Executive director of Saint Hill Arts Festival.

Vacation Work:

1997 Director of exhibitions for St Hill arts festival, (Sussex). This position involved receiving the artists and their work, acting as their hostess throughout the festival and seeing that the artwork was hung in a suitable space to the artist’s specifications.

1996 Director of the Children's Project for St Hill arts festival, (Sussex). This involved the advanced planning of a week’s activities in the arts for children of all ages, ordering relevant materials, and recruiting a voluntary staff to assist. In addition to these responsibilities, I personally delivered many of the activities.

1995 Summer school, (Sussex). Organising and delivering one week of art activities for 7 to 16 year-olds. Under the umbrella of the school where the summer school was taking place I was responsible for planning, ordering materials and delivering the activities.

Exhibitions:

1999 and 2000 Exhibitions of oil paintings with two other artists, (East Grinstead Art Centre).

2002 Exhibition at the Lighthouse Design Centre, (Glasgow).

2002 Degree show exhibition (Galashiels)

2002 New Designers, Islington exhibition centre (London)

2002 Now Gallery of contemporary art

2006 East Grinstead Arts Center

2007 East Grinstead Arts Center.

2008 Crawley Library Exhibition Space.

Other:

1992-1995 Wirral Youth Theatre member.

1993-1995 Wirral Youth Service Travel Panel rep. At monthly meetings myself and some other youth reps from the Liverpool area reviewed suggestions from the various youth groups in the district. Funding and assistance was allocated largely on our recommendations.

2000 Class rep. Textile Design, Heriot-Watt University.

2001-2002 Member of the Textile Design Society Heriot-Watt University.

2001 Photographic commission for hotel website, (Jedburgh).

Email for references:

kirsteenann@gmail.com

Campervan designs and maps...where next.

Where will we go next and how might we get there?

In between trips around this part of Portugal have been obsessively drawing campervan ideas and and looking at maps. When you stand on a pristinely empty beach with your kids running out across the sand like deer, one thought takes hold,
"How can we do more of this in the future?"

I'm keen to explore my native Scotland and Wales (which has more castles per square mile than any other country in the world!) I've also always had a thing about North Devon. My daughter is desperate to spend time in Paris, we have passed through but not explored.

Looking at the French road map I never realized how well connected we are with France....

We need a Britstop book, to sleep free and legal in the UK, and Aires book for France, and a van, car turned into camper... Here following are my ideas.

Portugal: Ideas and Impressions.

Portugal: Impressions and ideas.

I'm sitting in the main street in Quarteira, in The Algarve, in Portugal. Is a little scruffy. A Christmas fair has been running on and off for a few days and they have put read carpet all down the street, which is now rather dirty! A busker is singing a mix of the usual busker hits, like, “American Pie” and something I assume is Portuguese, but it's a really hard language to pick up and I learned more Spanish, Italian and German in 24 hours than I have Portuguese in a month - sorry.

A few moments ago a man walked by with a bucket of half alive octopus. There are lots of bikes and scooters, cars are hard to afford here. Portugal is pretty poor and pretty sparsely populated. Lots of people don't have jobs, however many of them are not unemployed, they live off small plots of family owned land, growing most of their food and bartering a bit more. Even in the town lots of bits of verge or unused land has been adopted by householders and turned into stretches of vegetable garden.

There are many empty show and decaying buildings but also little friendly business almost always kept very clean, even if their stuff is a bit old and scuffed it is usually wiped, maintained and polished. It shows a short of self respect which is typical of the almost poverty of many here. They don't act down on their luck, they act happy, friendly, community minded - without much wealth. Up the street a young woman and a weathered old lady have been dancing to the busker while minding empty stalls, at the end of the song they embrace and go back to work, see what I mean?

There are also many empty apartment buildings - I saw this in Spain too. Row upon row of holiday flats empty nine months of the year. I may a man who owned one and worked in London, he moved to Portugal but before that had owned it ten years and spent one month total in it. I did last them on my bike, and passed the building sites throwing up more and think, can't we share them out somehow? I'm not socialist, I do think you should benefit from hard work but surely a system could be worked out to learn them out to displaced families or something? I don't know but it seems so sad that people are sleeping in the doorways of 100 empty little fully functional apartments!

The coast and the countryside, the history and the wildlife are wonderful here, feasting on being surrounded by so much differentness.

Love, Kirsteen

A Life Less Stationarity.

A Life Less Stationarity.

So yesterday was a huge landmark in all our lives, l taught my daughter to skip stones across the water so they bounce a few times before sinking! OK, it's ridiculous to call that a huge landmark, but then again is it? It's only eight years until she's an adult, how much we can miss of our children's lives of we let other people bring them up? And how much can they miss of their own lives if they spend six hours a day in a room with twenty-nine other kids writing stuff down for twelve years! I know many schools are very good and most teachers well-intentioned, but can we really call that a good education? What if they also spend their free time on screens? We are the generation replacing going and doing, with clicking and viewing. I'm not saying it's all bad, my daughter has become a fluent reader reading comics on YouTube in the absence of books in English! A wonderful future innovation! I guess I'm looking for balance. I'm trying to skip a stone across the surface of technology without sinking out of sight of the sunlight!

So there is also a narrative, we are travelling around Spain and Portugal in a campervan, to find adventure, experience, history, culture and a lot of sand! The last time I wrote in any detail we had made it to Santiago de Compostela and were staying in a hotel while broken down!

I'm now in a campsite in southern Portugal where we plan to sell the van and stay in a campsite but until spring. How did this happen? Well, we fixed the van in Santiago and set of South again in some of the worst weather we've seen in these parts, rain and flooding, rain on the roads coming from six directions! We got to Tui and stopped at the aire (free, camper only stop, which is basically a car park with a tap and a drain). The rain cleared and the kids and I took a walk.

Tui: I think Tui is my happy place! A perfect, tiny city, high on a hill with constant views of the wide blue river.

Porto: Porto is like London and Florence had a baby who got all the best features from both parents, add cable cars and trams too! It seems like a hundred thousand red roofs climb the hills from the river and no two the same shape!

Sao Mamede: We arrived in torrents of rain, everything was damp and our damp coats brought more wet into the van, keeping the door open was impossible, everyone huddled in the van on screens, everyone was freezing and board. I read it's a beautiful part of Portugal but the rain never let up and we left for more exhausting driving through minimal visibility. People we met were friendly and helpful, places were clean, if sometimes a bit scruffy from age, as I have found throughout Northern Spain and Portugal.

Fatima: Some point after Sao Mamede we broke down again, losing power on the long hills that characterize driving in Portugal (the big trucks frequently get down to 30 kilometres per hour!). A gentleman stopped to help us and ended up spending the whole day driving us around to garage and town, my son referred to him as a taxi! Fatima is odd, the whole town exists because some children had a vision of the Virgin Mary there. The pope has visited recently and the town is littered with statues of him, every shop sells statues of Mary and religious souvenirs, also wax body parts to bring the virgin as gifts if you require them healing! My daughter and I found wax hearts and intestinal tracts a bit macabre. If any of you would like me to bring you a wax spleen, say the word! There is no actual community there, just souvenir shops, hotels and churches!

All mankind has the right to celebrate their faith as they see fit, but personally, I felt real awe walking in the pilgrim's footsteps to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela and Fatima left me unmoved.

The garage at Fatima said my van needed a new engine and it would cost five thousand euros! The people at my breakdown cover were not convinced and we agreed to ship it South to a garage recommended by a Facebook friend!

Vilamoura: we took the train to Vilamoura and the van got a piggyback on a breakdown truck! The van was picked up on a Tuesday in Fatima but did not join us in southern Portugal until Friday! No one knows what she did while of on her own, if she turns out to be pregnant there is a waiting list for the little campervan! We took the train, which was less than a hundred euros for a family of four to travel first class halfway down the country! The train station cafe was a dead ringer for 1977!

Vilamoura is beautiful but the old town is so manicured and populated by English and Germans that it is indistinguishable from the hotels and golf course! Tourism gone mad, visit Portugal and miss the whole culture.

We went from staying in the four seasons, with four swimming pools and a spa (on the breakdown insurance) to sleeping in the broken van on the garage four-court in lashing rain by a busy road when the breakdown insurance ran out! Seldom has such contract been part of my experience! But the same Facebook friend came and took us ice-skating in a glittering mall!

Quartarteira: The new quote was for a fuel pump was a thousand euros, but after the previous breakdown and way too much eating out because the freezing wet van was no fun, we didn't have it.

We patched the van up and drove it to a campsite in Quartarteira. It's along the beach from Vilamoura and joined together, like Brighton and Hove if there was fourteen miles of sandy beach and spiders the size of fifty pence pieces and the colour of the sun!

The lady at the campsite explained it to me like this, “Up that end they lie in the sun beside their villas, this end we work!” she chuckled quite cheerfully about that, clearly a woman who understands that no happiness has ever been found by doing nothing!

We arrived at the campsite, after two months on the road in a basic van, two breakdowns and a month of rain, every scrap of clothing was dirty, everyone was dirty, we were down to a handful of euros and dead tired.

We washed out clothing and bedding, charged our devices and made a plan, sell the van and rent a hut with a shower and flushing loo! Here we will stay until spring, no longer meandering around the coast visiting every village and bay, but it's beautiful here and we will explore and learn.

I've figured out the smart way to have come here, flights from the UK are very cheap and the campsite hut is six hundred euros the first month but only three thereafter. We could have flown Gatwick to Faro for about £50 each! (half an hour in a taxi each side) and rented a hut, skipped the rain, saved a fortune, never slept in a garage, never been boxed in, never arrived to sleep at an aire and found it shut, never broke down, never been tearful or lost and driving in circles.

But who wants to skip life, we would have never stood in improbably silent streets, awed by the vast churches, met heroes in nowhere places, chanced on stunning bridges and empty beaches! High fived at working out the toll booths! Inspired our friends and strangers met, tested our courage and communication skills. You don't want to skip over life, that's not an education!

Love Kirsteen

End of the line for "Hope"

"Tomorrow we may have to fight again, but for now we'll ride the train to the end of the line. And then, we'll jump." To steal a line from a good film.

"Hope" the campervan has reached the end of the line.

The van will be €1000 to fix, and we don't have it, but it runs at 30 miles per hour. I'm also fed up spending money on it that would pay for a flat!! So I am going to get them to put it back together broken and drive it to the nearest camp site, about 20 minutes drive where we will use it as a static caravan!

I walked to the campsite from town today. It's nice. There is a cafe, bar, mini supermarket, tennis courts and play-park. Lots of winter discounts working out about €13 a night perhaps less. She's going to work out what we qualify for. It's all fenced off and the door office is manned so it's very safe for kids. Clearly it also has showers and loos and stuff. There are little hits to rent if you visit. Everyone come see us!

I asked the bike shop to make me an offer for renting a bike and seat for 3 months.

The campsite is 5 minutes walk from the beach and about 15 from the town centre. You go down a road a few hundred meters and the rest is all along a promenade by the sea where cars are not allowed. It's a very good place to be stranded. The town has two beaches, swimming pool, market, art gallery, shops, cafes, medical clinic, crazy golf...

You can take a boat cruise to caves with a swim and dolphins for €30.

A scooter for the day is €15. A bike with no long discount is €5 a day.

There is free wifi on the beach!!!

When March comes we will ship our stuff on a pallet for about €200 and fly or train and boat home.

We can list the van on ebay (Campervan, running, needs fuel pump, already in Portugal) I have seen such things.

Non Portugal. Sci-fi place!

While my van was lost (allegedly it has been found and will shortly show up at the garage) I had a night at a smart hotel in Vilamoura. I am very glad we had somewhere nice to sleep but the place was a bit odd. I've usually travelled to friends and family or cheap hotels down in the city, even in Egypt, which can be a bit dangerous, we walked around rubbing elbows with the people there. 

Back to Portugal, this morning I left the hotel to get some food and found myself in this "old town" so manicured I kept asking myself if it was fake, or part of the hotel. Portuguese people swept and cut grass while in all the shops and cafes only English and German was spoken! Everyone who helped me/served me addressed me in English without trying their native tongue first. All signs were in English only! I felt like some sort of white oppressor! The manicured town reminded me of a sci-fi book I once read where everyone's parents turned out to be robots!!!

I had heard of the concept of traveling only for the climate change and avoiding local culture and indeed contact, it was freaky and tragic and rude! Bring back Portugal please, and all the attendant difficulties! Down with you heated pool, giant double beds and tree-surgeoned palm trees! 

I'm actually looking forward to camping in my van again!

Some things I like about Portugal so far:

It's cheap. First class train tickets for a trip half way down the country for us all were under €100! Really nice food is also cheap.

They bend over backwards to make kids welcome, including there mess, noise and fussy eating habits, grumpy screaming, sandy kids seem to be made just as welcome as clean cute well behaved ones!

It's beautiful, do a google image search!

It's warm.

The pace of life seems pretty relaxed, clearly if you are trying to get work done this is frustrating, but over all it's nice to be chilled and embrace the three hour lunch/siesta.

Some things I'm struggling with:

Portuguese is really hard, and frankly, unlike my husband, I'm naturally very bad at languages anyway - I do try hard.

The driving, they hardly signal at all and park everywhere, I saw a car parked on a roundabout with one wheel on the pavement! You have to make damn sure they are planning to stop at a crossing before you cross.

The smoking, you can smoke inside lots of places and bothers my daughter a lot.

Broke down again in Portugal.

Ok, so I'm a fool for setting off in various beat up vans but I actually know someone who has kept his day job and is tinkering and rebuilding his van so much his work friends say he will never set off! I think he, will but you get the point, life never provides the ideal window to do stuff you want. No adult dentist ever got that letter from the tooth fairy "Dear, Dentist, Good job, this year you don't need to be a dentist anymore, I will be taking on all your responsibilities and funding you through school, so you can go be a dancer like you always wanted! Go rock the world of hip hop!" You have to do it anyway! Similar with the learn to drive a manual idea, sure I will, others have said Tim should learn and have two drivers, wait till we can buy a brand new van... Some people wait till they retire, some are then too scared or unfit. We met a guy in Javea who got second hand bikes cheap in his shop often, he said people planned there whole life's to come down in a camper and bike around the country, then they arrived and found they felt too scared of a fall at there age, truly tragic.

So my van is back in the garage and the trip is not quite on plan...and my last trip didn't go to plan, come to think of it I'm not sure my life at home always went to plan!

I'm in Portugal, in a town so historic it took 15 years to get planning permission for a Mc D here. I've never been here before, nor have the kids, we have been helped, we have been surprised, we have been sad, we have been frustrated and we have been high!

My daughter talks about places she will travel with her friends and then kids when she has them! My son says  "I love mine holiday!"

I have become completely used to driving a big vehicle and driving in Spain and Portugal sometimes in pretty bad conditions. We have all learned more Spanish, and about three words in Portuguese!

If I get the van going again for a sensible amount we will pick a campsite on the south coast and make day trips for the worst of the weather and because the van is being unreliable. That is only about 3 hours away. We have been traveling well over a month.

We have missed all the terrible flooding, storms, snow and danger Spain and Portugal have been having. We have been impressed with the warmth of people and the beauty around us. On balance defiantly worth it even if it ends today, but don't wish that for me. X

Things have gone wrong but right too

I'm down in Portugal right now in a van with my family. I bought the van for £2500 and converted it for £400, it's pretty basic but OK. Lots has gone wrong, in fact it's in the garage getting fixed right now, but lots has gone right too. My family and I have learned so much wandering through Spain and Portugal with no plan other than roughly South! I've been here over a month and we have five to go. The emotion is intense, so much is new, the highs and the lows. Even if I can't sustain this, it's already changed us all for the better. I would not undo it, mistakes and all. If you want to change your life you can, it's a matter of a firm choice, not of circumstances or luck. I hope this helps someone. 

These are my own pictures, I have stood in each of these moments and that cannot now be taken away from me in the future. X