My dad is an artist and he must have been my earliest influence. He used to work with textiles, especially weaving, and we have always had his large, colourful and mostly abstract woven paintings up in the house. Now he produces beautifully crafted wooden ducks and birds and with my Mum's help, is making a living in his retirement. It is difficult to discern the influence my dad's work has had on my own but I know its there in the subconscious. On the other hand, his advice has directly affected the way I work. Whenever I am painting, or planning a painting, I refer back to these two key statements he made to me, which have been invaluable; a) draw what you see not what you think you see, and b) think of sketching as a way of gathering information. The latter particularly appealed to me since I could never see the point in all the sketching we were expected to do before starting a painting at college and university. My methods when devising a painting have never been traditional in terms of using a sketchbook and filling up pages of it everyday, I tend to loose the sharpness of an image if I endlessly work it out on paper first. Preferably I will do one sketch of my original idea/ composition and then go straight to canvas from life, or I will take photographs and sketch and then go to canvas with both. Sometimes I even write down an idea for a composition, especially if it comes to me when I don't have a sketchbook - inspiration can strike at any time! I have a very broad appreciation of art and have never tried to emulate any artists work in particular. Inspiration comes generally from light and dark and its play across various surfaces, textures and shapes. Commonly inspiring props I like to use are fabrics, water and glass. They all have an immense capacity for manipulation to achieve many different effects. When I need to start a new painting I like to combine a few of these items with some central object like a flower or vessel, and create compositions and juxtapositions with them. Then, when I think I've found something interesting, I photograph it and sketch it and generally have to fulfil the desire to paint it as soon as physically possible. It shouldn't take long to find an image I want to paint - I've noticed that if I spend too long on a composition it falls apart and what I saw in it originally has disappeared forever - strike while the iron is hot! Occasionally I will stumble upon a composition in life which is just there and asking to be painted, so I record it somehow (by sketching, photo's or writing its description down) and try to get it onto canvas while the image is still fresh and inspiring. I particularly appreciate anonymous objects, the kind that can be moved from one context to another whilst retaining their pure empirical qualities. For example, a wine glass with a beautiful outline can be juxtaposed with many other objects and doesn't distract the viewer with ideas relating to real-life (like eating and drinking), so they are free to absorb the abstract and aesthetic values of form, light, texture, weight or colour etc. However, if I were to fill the glass with wine and place it on top of a table from a normal perspective, the viewer could be led into ideas about everyday preoccupations when what I am actually trying to achieve is an escape from those ordinary things, a kind of daydream effect. Flowers are fascinating for so many reasons. They hold a lot of emotional value for most cultures. In my own western culture they symbolize love, happiness, femininity, passion, death and beauty. We give them to each other to help us declare sympathy or celebration and affection. Many flowers have evolved to appear like the insects they need to attract to help spread their pollen. This can result in some spectacular forms and colours with petals and stigma which look like mandibles and over-positors. They can also be powerfully sexual. Artistically I like to mess around with their physical characteristics and so the emotional associations we make with them will probably change too - but I prefer to leave that part to the viewer. For example, submerging a flower head in water completely changes its appearance; colours and dimensions are enhanced and distorted, tiny air bubbles become trapped on the petals like little gems and rainbows appear from the refracted light.

Looking at all of these things helps to drag my mind, and hopefully the viewers, away from the normalities of life towards beauty and sensuality. To help them see the world just slightly differently. I'm not interested in making a statement about anything, its not meant to be too dramatic, just enough to make the viewer raise an eyebrow and look closer. Why am I not an abstract painter if I am trying to escape from everyday preoccupations? Basically because I love to reproduce what I see before me in this way, I am obsessed by the process and fascinated by the way things actually look. Technically I am mostly self taught because "how to draw and paint" is not really taught in colleges and universities anymore. Therefore, I think that my astonishment at being able to produce paintings which have a degree of technical aptitude has never left me. The thrill of achieving my goal technically is never lost and I'm always driven to improve with every painting. There has to be a level of difficulty for the subject to be worth pursuing further (but not too difficult - I don't want to drive myself mad with it!).

Also, the world is already full of amazing things to see which occur naturally and to change them with a more expressionistic painting technique would be, from my personal perspective, to obliterate the physical characteristics of the object which make it so interesting. When you get down to the minutiae of an object it becomes abstracted in its own way, and when you look at an object from an unusual perspective or place it amongst other elements it can take on a whole new life in your mind. Graham Sutherland is one of my favourite painters and he takes so much inspiration from nature. A technique I believe he used was to take an abstract form that he had found in nature, a gnarled tree root for example, and to zoom in on it to a macroscopic level and then reproduce the whole thing as an enormous painting - bringing to life and altering our perception of something that would have gone unnoticed to many of us in our everyday lives. This is partly what I am trying to do, focusing on an object and displaying it in such a way that will provoke the viewer into seeing it differently.

In art it appears that there are two extremes; abstraction and realism and then all the possibilities in between. In his own way Sutherland seems to cross the divide between these two ideas about painting and I think I am trying to cross it in my own art. I love abstract painting (Picasso, Auerbach) and paintings which achieve a more loose and painterly look not as realistic as my own (Schiele, Manet, Cezanne etc etc). However, I equally admire Vermeer, Rembrandt and Chuck Close, and Surrealism creeps in to almost every painting I do, and this is not deliberate! I have tried to be messier and more expressionistic with the paint and to slash a paintbrush across the canvas in a meaningful way - but the result is not worth looking at, I just can't do it.