Meet the artist who went to art school in her 60s and has her own exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and works for fashion brand Toast

Carol always wanted to be an artist but life got in the way. The words appeared in her final show at York College where she was the only mature student.

“There were about 100 students, they were all 18, 19 and 20,” says Carol, who was 66 at the time. “I was old enou gh to be their granny but that was fine.”

Now she is as an established artist who is about to put on an exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), near Wakefield, but she has travelled a bumpy road to get there.

Carol was born in Middlesborough and went to the gram mar school in Ripon, where she was pushed away from art.

“I loved art but was also quite clever as well,” she says. “My father was head teacher at a primary school in Bedale, so he was interested in me going to university and maybe doing English.”

The headmaster at her grammar school batted aside her wish to do an art A-level, saying: “Art is for Saturday mornings.”

“I wasn’t very happy, I was a bit disgruntled but what I am surprised by in a way when I look back, because I’ve always bee n quite feisty and a strong person, is that I didn’t challenge this.”

After a degree in sociology at Birmingham Polytechnic, Carol was a community worker, a community artist, and the cook at Birmingham Arts Laboratory.

When she moved to York, she worked as the catering manager at Debenhams.

After meeting her first husband, who was an art lecturer, she spent 15 years looking after their two children.

“All that time, I’d always loved interiors and I’d always loved art. I’d always read lots of books and gone to exhibitions, but it was strange because it was my husband who was the artist, and I was always his wife. All those years it was never seen as my thing.”

Her husband was offered a job in Bangkok teaching in an international school. Carol went with their daughter, who was 13, and worked as a kindergarten teacher in the same school. She produced art and poems with the young children, and was inspired by artists in Bali, Japan and Borneo.

Later she returned to York, leaving her husband in the Thai capital, and retrained as a nursery manager. Now she lives opposite Knavesmire in a terrace house with a spacious modern kitchen at the back .

Carol remarried, and has been married for 12 years to Colin Webster, a criminologist who studied on the same course as her in the Seventies.

Her wish to be an artist was rekindled at York Open Studios, where she met a retired nurse who had been accepted on an art foundation course. Carol followed his lead, signed up at York College, and finally began doing wha t she had always wanted to do.

Now she is herself a regular at open studios, delivering a lively stream of chat to visitors.

In conversation, Carol is sparky and animated, almost unstoppable when in her artistic stride.

“All these years that I didn’t go to art college and didn’t do art, I always knew painting was my love. Whenever I went to galleries, it was always painting that I loved,” she says.

Once the wider introduction to the foundation course was over, she confined herself to the painting room.

“They give you a space and what’s lovely is that what I felt for me was that they gave me a physical space to do it, and also gave me mental space and the encouragement to have a go. I wasn’t restricted and I just did my own thing,” she says.

For her final show, Carol painted every day, producing 60 small paintings.

She built shelves for these paintings, calling the show Actually I Can, and was named York College of Art and Design Lifelong Student Of The Year in 2018.

Her first exhibition was held at Partisan in Micklegate. “They gave me confidence and have continued to support me,” she says.

After that came her work for the upmarket clothes chain TOAST.

She was spotted by staff from the York branch during her first open studios. “And the joke was, your figures all look like they’re wearing TOAST clothes”.

Her paintings were shown in York, then prints were displayed at 16 branches nationwide. This created more exposure, boosting her presence on Instagram. Sadly, she jokes, there were no free clothes, although she is wearing a blouse from the shop when we meet.

Now, at 72, Carol has produced 51 new paintings for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

All are for sale at prices ranging from £352 to £1,430. The show also aims to recreate her studio, complete with empty pots, that banner, and her messy creativity.

For the YSP café, she has produced four large paintings of figures looking as if they are in a café. She was asked by Amanda Peach at the gallery if she ever paints landscapes.

“If you look at my paintings, I hardly ever do blue and I hardly ever use green,” she says.

As a “sort of personal joke”, some of the larger paintings feature a window, through which can be spied “an abstract landscape, or as near to a landscape as I can get."

Her first paintings, shaped by her love of interiors, were domestic scenes of vases, chairs, sofas and beds.

Then she introduced her trademark figures, influenced by so-called kitchen sink painters such as John Bratby.

Douglas paints with acrylics, applying it with rollers rather than the traditional paint brush, building up layer after layer in a palette of warm greys, browns and mustards. Her alluring paintings depict household objects and people in domestic settings, inspired by her experiences of everyday life.

Working in her home studio, she never sketches or plans, just goes where the speedy rollers take her, liking the looseness and fluidity they bring.

“When I start painting something, I just paint. I like the speed of let’s just see what happens. It either works or it doesn’t.”

She paints in acrylic, mixing her own colours, often warm greys, browns and mustards.

“They just happen, add a bit of that, work it a bit, repeat,” she says.

This makes it difficult to recreate a colour. “If you say, ‘Can you mix that weird green I like?’, maybe I can, maybe I can’t. It’s very arbitrary. With me there’s no plan.”

Her mid-tone colours are influenced by natural dyes, where all the muted colours match. Nothing clashes as there are no primary colours.

“Not that I am conscious of doing that, but that’s what happens. All of my colours are knocked back with something. If I make a pink, it will be a rusty red colour and a bit of black, and that’s my dirty pink. I love dirty pink, I love ochre.”

And she paints what she would buy herself.

“Every time I do a painting, I do it for me,” she says.

As it’s all still quite new, is she giddy with excitement?

Carol prods this question, as if with the wrong end of a paint brush.

“No, I wouldn’t say giddy, I’m quietly excited,” she says, with a smile.

Carol Douglas: Actually I Can, West Yorkshire Sculpture Park, July 13-October 27