I have drawn and used watercolours since I was little. After I was given oil paints at eighteen I seriously began to paint. As I was commuting daily to London by then I spent lunch-hours and any free time I had in the public art galleries. I began buying books on art.

My early influences were Francesco Goya, William Hogarth, Hieronymus Bosch and Francis Bacon. Their works disturbed and fascinated me. I recognise now that this was my first exposure to the many aspects of the surreal in art. From the perspective of light I relished J.M.W. Turner’s use of colour, texture and his genius in manipulating light. The mystery of light continues to be important in my work.

Whilst studying art as a mature-aged student I was mesmerised by the space/shape images of H.C. Escher. I often use abutting images that project a tension between each image. At that time the surrealist work of Magritte and Salvador Dali caught my imagination.

Botany has always interested me. Whilst living in Middle Eastern deserts I drew and collected plants for the British Museum Herbarium at Kew outside London. My depiction of all types of flowers took a bolder more expressionistic turn after exposure to the magnificent ‘in your face’ floral paintings by Georgia O’Keefe.

The almost solid quality of the air in Egypt led me to use the pointillist technique whilst working with oils. I find this process particularly effective with acrylics and unprimed linen.

By then I was travelling from Cairo to Claremont, a southern Californian University, where a tutor suggested I use acrylics as they were less likely to crack when rolled up for transporting from Egypt to the U.S. This is when I was introduced to the Stain Painting techniques used by Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. Later I was fortunate to take a Master Class with Frankenthaler in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Since settling in this country and living, travelling and teaching art outback for some years in the mid 1990’s, the colours of this land have seeped deep within me. The habit, hues and textures of indigenous trees are a strong influence in my “Mind” series. I relate to Mandy Martin’s work, which for me, expresses a strong earth connection. Her practise of using stretched paper over wooden stretchers for work executed in the field, was a method I found invaluable whilst living in my bus.

The major retrospective of James Gleeson’s work at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2004 was a seminal event for me. I was drawn back again and again to his 1948 painting “We Inhabit the Corrosive Littoral of Habit”. Gleeson wrote of this piece — “We are the creatures of habit ... not responding with all our awareness to any situation. Our awareness is eroded by ... the systems we form”. Until this moment his painting, with his supporting philosophical comments, is the most important work of art that I have ever seen!