Seascapes, saltmarshes, sailing boats, sunlight streaming through cloud-scudded sky and glinting across creeks and estuaries; Shirley Carnt’s paintings light up the coastal studio where she has lived and worked for almost 70 years.
Many are of the shoreline within just a few miles of her Thornham studio and Holme-next-the-sea home. But among the pictures of her native Norfolk are hints of adventures much further afield.
Shirley was a pioneer female racing driver, held a world fly fishing record, out-sailed pirates, lunched with Fidel Castro in Cuba, sang with Cliff Richard on her honeymoon, was imprisoned in Egypt and cheated death in capsizes, crashes and crash-landings.
Shirley Carnt in her sitting room, with nine-year-old Simba, below one of her pieces, at home at Thornham. Picture: Denise Bradley
Now 88 she still loves painting and adventure and regularly swims in the creeks and sea of north Norfolk, accompanied by her beloved terrier Simba – the latest in a very long line of dogs Shirley has owned and loved throughout her life.
She grew up on a farm, surrounded by animals, in Docking in the 1930s and remembers wartime evacuee children arriving, shoeless and sewn into their winter clothes. Her own background is of wealth and privilege. She has been hunting with the future king, her first art exhibition was shared with the girlfriend of the man who went on to marry Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother was a regular visitor to her cottage near Balmoral in Scotland.
Shirley has loved painting since childhood. Her parents did not want her to go to art college so she began a law degree at Cambridge, but left for an art course in London after a year.
Artist Shirley Carnt at her home at Thornham. Picture: Denise Bradley
However, she met her first husband, engineer Michael Carnt, at Cambridge. He introduced her to motor racing and she raced at Snetterton and Silverstone as well as modelling (photographed by a young Bamber Gasgoigne.) She and Michael had two children just 11 months apart and when the marriage fell apart she took the children to the tiny cottage she had bought on impulse in Thornham a few years before.
She began painting again, and selling her work in local pubs, to fund family life, foraging for samphire, cockles and rabbits from the marshes. Asked to travel to Egypt to record the paintings in ancient tombs, soon to be flooded for the Aswan dam, she joined a camel trek into the desert – which ended in a dark and crowded prison cell as she had no identification on her when stopped by military police.
It is one of the many adventures Shirley, now a great grandmother of three, included in her memoir Life on the Wild Side.
Her second husband was Jimmy Deterding of Kelling Hall and for more than 40 years she helped him run the north Norfolk estate. Jimmy’s grandfather had founded Shell and bought the estate to entertain guests, commissioning the beautiful butterfly-shaped flint and brick hall and the tennis courts where Jimmy’s father honed his talent to such an extent he played in Wimbledon in the 1930s.
Artist Shirley Carnt in her studio at Thornham. Picture: Denise Bradley
Shirley Deterding (who continued to use Carnt as an artist) opened a riding stables at Kelling. Over the decades she has sold cars and run a clothes shop in Brancaster and an art gallery in Holt, but she and Jimmy also found plenty of time to travel.
Fishing, shooting and golfing trips were transformed into intrepid trips to some of the the remotest places on earth with Shirley accepting invitations to trek out to wildernesses from the Arctic to Africa. She stroked wild bears in Alaska, fed lions by hand in Kenya, camped among leopards in Ethiopia and encountered wolves in Mongolia. The people she met were often almost as exotic.
In her socialite heyday friends included the Roosevelt family and she lunched with Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
She always travelled with sketchbooks and watercolour paints – and often gave pictures to people she met, including President Castro when he invited her host, Jack Hemingway, son of author Ernest, to lunch.
Artist Shirley Carnt in her studio at Thornham. Picture: Denise Bradley
At her studio in Thornham she is surrounded by memories of her adventurous past, and of the local landscapes which have been close to her heart all her life. Titles include Drifts of poppies from Docking Hill, Mallards dropping into Thornham Creek, Evening light at Titchwell. They are drenched in that bright, beautiful light which glances off low cloud at sunrise and sunset, colouring an entire landscape.
Among the glorious light-filled Norfolk paintings are detailed studies of fish, birds, horses and flowers, of Scottish rivers and tropical islands.
Every year she thinks it might be the last she exhibits – and every year she reopens her studio to visitors.
See Shirley’s paintings at her open studio, at Coastguard House, The Green, Thornham, open most days – call 01485 525717 to check before travelling.