Anne Baldwin uses her loyal social media following to get clients and has even had a couple place an order from the USA.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00It's not quite every day that a police officer trades their uniform for a lifetime of art.
00:06Anne Baldwin from St Mary's Island swapped her 15-year policing career after a life-changing
00:11car accident. She credits her success to her strong-willed nature and has even experienced
00:16homelessness.
00:17I was homeless, I was on the streets in Chelsea and I thought to myself, look, is this it
00:24for me? Is that all that's going to be for me? I'm just going to die on the streets at
00:29the age of 16, 17. The car crash left me with life-changing injuries, so I couldn't do my
00:37job anymore. Basically, I can't move my hand and I can't twist.
00:44Doctors told her surgery could leave her paralysed from the waist down.
00:48I always know that something good is going to come out of it. So when I had the accident
00:54and like five years later they told me that's it. I mean, I'd actually studied for my sergeant's,
01:00I'd passed my exams second time round. I was so chuffed. I thought, great, I'm going to
01:06have a team, it's going to be amazing. And then overnight everything changed. But the
01:11way that you have to look at it, it doesn't matter how bad things get. It doesn't matter
01:15if it's five minutes, five days, weeks, months, years, even decades later, something good
01:22is going to come out of it. It's just you don't always see it at the time.
01:27But the ambidextrous artist taught herself how to draw using online tutorials and says
01:31art helps calm her anxious mind.
01:34And I was doodling, literally just doodling on a piece of paper. And I thought, oh, hello,
01:40that's not too bad. So I got onto YouTube. Then I started buying equipment. I now have
01:46a mantra, which is basically bad things happen for good reasons.
01:51Now Anne runs a successful studio from her Chatham living room. Her social media reach
01:56has meant she's had customers from as far away as the USA. Now she wants to start painting
02:01and turn her attention to landscapes.
02:04Art didn't always seem like the natural career path for Anne. After achieving a D in her
02:08Art A level, she's managed to make some extraordinary portraits specialising in humans and pets.
02:15And this is Anne with her dog Rupert.
02:18I'm Xenia Nakvi for CAME TV in Chatham.