Two years ago, when I joined SOAG, I returned to acrylic painting after twenty-five years working with pen and ink and carbon dust as a scientific illustrator. I started painting in a much freer way, free from the hard-edged minimalism of my younger years, and free also from the extreme precision of science illustration.

I find myself painting environments that invite the viewer in, or that the viewer can imagine inhabiting were they a different creature altogether – a small mammal or an insect – or that call attention to the interest and beauty of often overlooked places in the landscape. I like the fluid gestures of line in grass, wood, and water, and the solid uncompromising shapes of rock. I like the similarities that abound throughout the natural world – the whorls in wood grain and the whorls in water reflections, for example. And there is so much complex detail in the visual world. I think one of the artist’s tasks is to make try to make sense of it, and then to take what has been discovered and paint it for all its worth.