Siân Thomas grew up in south Wales close to land farmed and mined by generations of her family. Siân had an early love for drawing, and is largely self-taught.

Today her half-timbered thatched cottage home and studio in rural Worcestershire afford Sian the peaceful lifestyle that prompts the evocation of her most cherished early memories, and have led her back to her first love of drawing and painting.

Siân runs popular workshops and courses in watercolour painting and has shown her work in open studio events and several joint and solo shows throughout the UK. In 2023 she began to submit her work for competition and has been immediately rewarded, winning the Dry Red Press Award at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour Annual Exhibition and the Judge’s Choice Award at the International Women in Watercolour Exhibition.

In her work she explores the passage of time and a longing for the past through signs of wear in everyday objects. Use of high-quality watercolour materials enables her paintings to pause time and by careful scrutiny of surface texture, Sian expresses the ‘hiraeth’ embedded within. The ticking of the grandfather clock, the smell of the tool shed, the colour and pattern of mother’s tapestry, the smooth polished grain of grandmother’s darning mushroom, the detail of the carved stoat’s head on grandfather’s hazel walking stick remain significant memories that inform and imbue her work.

  “I seek evidence of human presence in everyday objects: signs of wear, the worn out, the rub of manual use, the rusted, the mouldy or moss covered.

  I treasure the transience and value the changes wrought through time and with use.  I find beauty in the impermanence expressed by nature's gradual reclamation of the man made.

  My hope is to pay close attention to the details that reveal the life of the object, aiming to convey the personality absorbed from its user”