Some of my earliest memories include drawing.  I have no idea what pulled me to it but I was always drawing exotic people and fantasy creatures – fairies and elves.  My first drawing was of a Princess. Who knows where this came from – maybe I copied from another child, but my passion to draw was born that day.

Like other creatives before and since, I was encouraged by teachers to follow an artistic path but discouraged from pursuing art as a career by parents who wanted me to do something ‘sensible’.  And so it was that my ‘art’ was left to gather dust.  Many years later, in the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) I stood before a painting by Jackson Pollock and cried.  Big wet tears.  I had never seen anything so beautiful.  This enormous ‘landscape’ filled my vision.  His work pulled at something deep inside and my love affair with art was reignited.  I signed up for a part-time Degree as a mature student at Winchester School of Art.  Painting wasn’t an option since space was limited for ‘part timers’ and so I focused on ‘installation’ art.  In my mind, it has always represented a path between sculpture and painting.  Or maybe drawing.  In my case, lines connecting objects to tell a story.

Then life took over and I abandoned art for the second time.

What is it in us that beckons us to be artists?  Perhaps it is an innate need to communicate with others. To find a mutual language which speaks to those who look.  I have always dreamed that I am an artist – I dream that I am painting.  For practical reasons, the actuality of this lies somewhere further behind and I have come to be a painter later in life. 

I have heard that we need to spend 10,000 hours to become an expert at something – I can’t argue as I don’t know.  What I do know is that this strange, compelling, annoying, desperate desire to create, is like an itch that needs scratching.  I’m sometimes seriously unhappy when I am painting – but I am more unhappy when I don’t. 

My work is currently focused on landscapes, often aerial or map-like in nature, inspired by the likes of Pollock, Diebenkorn and Peter Lanyon. I live in the countryside – an ever-changing tapestry of colour and shapes; fascinating in its natural state but much more intriguing with the intervention of man.  Fields ring-fenced by hedges and walls.  Broken gates, the lines in the earth left by tractors and the designs in the harvest made by large machinery. Buildings old and new, brick and flint, wood, rusting metal.