My family first visited the Isle of Eigg in the Inner Hebrides in August 1967 when I was four.  We stayed as guests at Galmisdale House (the house in my logo), which sits on the slopes going up towards the Sgurr - the highest point on Eigg at around 1,200 feet.  My mother was so taken with it that for the next three years or so we rented Galmisdale Cottage, above and behind Galmisdale House, for 4 weeks each summer.  There was no electricity, so we had gas lights and night lights, calor gas bottles for cooking, and water was piped in from the burn running down the hill behind us.  Then apart from a couple of years in the early 1970s, we continued to go to Eigg every summer for the next 10 - 15 years, though now staying with friends at The Glebe.  Since then I've spent time on Skye, Rhum, Colonsay, Harris, and most recently on Mull in 2023, when we also visited Iona.  I'm still very drawn to the landscapes and seascapes of the Hebrides and to their rural buildings, plants and wildlife, and am hoping they'll be the subject of a lot more of my artwork.

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Italy is another place that has a strong draw for me.  In my gap year I spent six months in Rome as an au-pair for an Italian family living in Via Arenula - not far from the Tiber, and a stone's throw from Largo Argentina and Piazza Campo de' Fiori.  Despite being homesick, I was also completely smitten by Rome, Siena, the Italian Alps, and by everything about Italy.

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After dropping out of university in London I got a job at a firm of interior designer-decorators, initially making tea and doing the post.  For the next five or so years I had exposure to some wonderful houses, fabrics, wallpapers, antiques and art in the UK.  However, I wanted to travel, and in particular to go back to Italy.

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So I learnt how to teach English as a foreign language, and from 1990 - 2000, I travelled to Italy, Hungary, Egypt, Ecuador and Spain teaching English and exploring landscapes, art and architecture as much as possible.  The influences from this time - and in particular from almost four years in Italy - are too many to list.  I first wanted to create my own designs during a visit to the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, Sicily, in April 1992.  At that time I had the idea of creating wallpaper borders inspired by the Byzantine patterns decorating the chapel.  This didn't come to pass, but my memory of the place remains clear. 

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Following our house move to Shropshire in May 2018, I've been growing a reservoir of ideas to get onto paper, with the natural environment, cultivation, and/or rural buildings at the heart of these.  Attending a couple of short linocut courses taught by Jacqui Dodds at Westhope College a few years ago got me started; and then a 2-day collage course taught by Mark Hearld at Burlingham Hall in July 2023 so inspired me that over a long weekend in September 2023 I finally managed to produce my first collage: Lagandorain, Iona. I hope in time to combine printmaking and collage; for now I'm keen to continue experimenting with both.