​About Me

Hi, I’m Ali, and I live in the beautiful seaside town of Folkestone with my husband, Matt, our children, Kit and Henry, our golden retriever, Scout, and our cats, Mittens and Patchy.

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After reluctantly ending my art education at 16 for a more 'sensible' academic path, I became a student again in my late thirties, completing a graduate certificate (with Distinction) in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of London, followed by the Diploma in Portraiture programme at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in Chelsea.

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With a PGCE in post-compulsory education from the University of Greenwich, I’ve been an educator on and off for over thirty years. Before starting my art tutoring business from my home studio in 2014, I had taught in a wide range of educational settings both in the UK and abroad, including my time as Course Director at Kensington and Chelsea College.

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I now feel comfortable calling myself an artist, but for nearly two decades I lived with a kind of creative paralysis. I enrolled in classes and stopped attending. I bought sketchbooks that remained untouched. Somewhere along the way, every drawing or painting I attempted became a measure of my self-worth. The act of making art had become so complicated for me that I gave up many times over.

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Returning to art wasn’t a breakthrough moment. It was a gradual, sometimes reluctant process of loosening those knots and slowly rebuilding creative resilience. Working with children played an important part in that. It reminded me that art can serve many purposes -  a way to explore, to express, to observe, or simply to spend time. Over time, I remembered that art isn’t something you 'arrive at', but something you grow with across a lifetime.​

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7:7 brings together art education theory, art history, years of teaching and course design, and - crucially - my own lived experience, to help adults rebuild their relationship with art steadily and safely, in a way that accommodates each person’s natural artistic orientation.