The Art of Living

When artist Josephine Trotter and husband Angus decided to downsize, they needed to look no further than the farm buildings they had lived opposite for the past 40 years

- Charlotte Colville

The home of Josephine Trotter is bursting with interest and colour. It’s hard to imagine ever being bored or tired or uninspired here. Be it her fuchsia-pink bathroom, her floral wallpapers as bright as a summer garden or a collection of painted china teapots, every wall and surface displays a confidence with colour that can only come from the eye of an artist. And to appreciate Josephine’s truest passion, the onlooker needs only to stand back and enjoy. Her paintings. In glorious colours and exuberant forms, they positively beam from the walls. Here a London street heaves with the jostling crowds of a countryside march, there a simple bowl of crimson tulips spill from a blue vase. ‘A pernicious colour, crimson,’ tuts Josephine, who has such a powerful empathy with the material she uses that she gives it a wayward nature of its own. And it is in harnessing these colours and forms that she breathes life into her quite remarkable paintings, which in turn make the walls of her home a pleasure to behold.

SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP

Home and art have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship in Josephine and husband Angus’s lives. The pair had lived their married life and brought up their five children in a wonderfully rambling Warwickshire farmhouse, tucked among the rolling hills of the Cotswolds. Their immediate surroundings had been the very inspiration for a great many of Josephine’s paintings. But Josephine and Angus found themselves in a tight spot when Angus suffered a life-changing accident that would leave him with ongoing back problems. The steep staircases, long corridors, draughty windows and never-ending upkeep of the farmhouse proved too much for Angus and they realised it was time to downsize to a smaller home.