These pieces all came out of a long holiday spent in France visiting friends. The painting of ‘The Lane’ was from a very special and sacred place near to the house. It was a very hot summer’s day. I was drawing and painting in the lane, and a pollarded tree drew my attention.

Dragon flies flew past following the curve of the tracks on the lane itself. The vegetation was lush and rustled in the summer winds. Again the sketch made itself really quite quickly. My attention was complete and the whole experience had a quality that I knew needed to become a painting, even as I did the sketch.

When I got home I ordered a canvas from my art supplier to the same dimensions as the ‘Catbells’ piece as I had found that I had enjoyed the proportions to work on. The resulting painting evolved over the following winter months. It was wonderful to revisit the summer through the work.

There is another painting of a fence from the same location done previously to the large picture. Again, it was the lush vegatation next to the blonde wood that interested me. It felt different to England. We don’t have fences like this!

The ‘Chaos Granitique’ came from a motif discovered on the same holiday. We visited the location specifically to see these giant erratic boulders that had been left scattered in the landscape like some pebbles on a beach, but the scale was huge! I made a watercolour on the spot. One rock even looked like it had a punk haircut of ferns! But it was the quality of the light coming through the trees and the colour that interested me the most.