Painting for me is about holding onto moments where I experienced something profound; a powerful feeling that usually arises from the landscape, although I find subjects everywhere from the west end of London to my kitchen. I believe in celebrating the medium of oil paint and I often encorporate texture into my work to describe the subject where it feels necessary; this physical abstraction creates the realism I'm searching for. I spend a while composing my works on paper where I study the geometry, values and colour harmony of a scene before manipulating them all to fit my personal vision for the painting. This need to study the fundamentals of the composition combined with my preference to create textures through layering, has moved most of my working hours into the studio. Although all of the colour and value information about a subject is still gathered through direct observation from life in the form of colour notes and small oil sketches. My paintings can take weeks or months to complete, over that time I fight a battle with the paint surface to translate and preserve the emotion I experienced when I first saw the subject.