I am a watercolour artist living in the village of Yarnton, a waterlogged oversized hamlet north of Oxford.

I mostly paint Oxford and the surrounding countryside. I have a special love of trees and the grace they bestow as ancient kings and queens of the plant kingdom. They keep their secrets to imbue a royal grandeur over field and dale, unlike modern princes who pop that grandeur, speaking too openly for the right sized bag of money.

I admit to being sentimental about the countryside and seeking to capture the pastoral pleasures through a rose tinted lens. Of course, all is changing fast. Computer-aided crop management, debt funded agricultural machinery. Does the farmer still go outside to read the clouds, rub the soil between fingers, smell the compost to determine it's readiness? The mystery of human, animal, plant and soil seems to be receding into memory. It feels like we are becoming data points made to fit technology rather than free agents with tools as simple extensions of our basic physical capacity. To remind us what we are: bone and flesh.

Give me a hoe and a strip of soil.

Give me a brush and the laid white page.

One should always smell the soil before you plant and the paper before you blush it with pigment in water.

I try to paint poetically as best I can and I am always seeking to show subjects with a gentle touch of detail and colour. I try to concentrate on being sensitive to what I see and the message I want to impart to the viewer.