Catriona Olding, a Scottish painter living in Provence, paints under the pseudonym of Carmen Fyfe

Carmen Fyfe is a Scottish painter.  The daughter of a giant, she was born in 1963 and grew up in rural Renfrewshire on a farm near Bishopton between the Royal Ordnance Factory and the then derelict Formakin Estate.  These contrasting landscapes; sinister factory grounds and mysterious buildings and lost gardens of Formakin were indelibly impressed on her heart.

For 30 years she was handmaiden in a marriage between her sculptor husband and his Muse. In the early years she supported her growing family by working in general, psychiatric and practice nursing in Paisley, Glasgow’s East End and Linwood.

In 2008 she visited her former school art teacher in Montfort sur Argens, Provence, where the light, scent and dry landscape dazzled and re-intoxicated her heart.  In 2014 she moved to the Var and began to paint still life, landscape and figures, influenced by late 19th and early to mid 20th century English, French and Scottish painters.

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She and the Spectator Low Life columnist, Jeremy Clarke, were together for almost 10 years.  They married two months before his death in 2023.  She helped edit his 3rd collection of columns and occasionally writes for the Spectator

Her work is presently lending Provençal light and colour to private collections in London, Los Angeles and here in its native Provence.

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