After an accident when I was two years old I can see nearly nothing with my left eye so I don’t know what it is to have bifocal vision. That probably engendered my interest in how we see and what we perceive. 

I discovered Cezanne at Art school. It was the concerns in his painting that gave me my first glimpse under the bonnet; at what painting might be. As I get older and gather experience, the business of painting has continued to become richer. I haven’t.

My work is almost exclusively Still Life. I begin by assembling loosely-balanced compositions, recombining familiar objects as characters in a shallow and deliberately limited space, then working analytically I'll try to bind the objects together into an architecture of form and colour.

I'll paint the same passage day after day, trying to build the objects. I will repaint the same transition of light into shadow, trying to understand how the shapes fit together to describe the space, hoping that the surface will mesh and watching for that alchemy as colour and tone become light.

Some of these canvasses have been worked at for months and a just a few arrived like gifts, like photographs emerging in developer.

My Still Lives are formal compositions. They are measured and plotted, reduced and balanced but I hope that they’re not dull and dry.

I usually make an accurate plotted drawing for each painting. Drawing seems to be work, like building a wall and I start drawing knowing that I can finish it. Drawing is my scaffolding. Painting is different; more like juggling.

I think of paintings as poems or short stories and they’re peopled with the things I have around me, a cast of familiar characters: jugs, bottles, boxes and pots.

I involve photographic images in compositions so that I can play with spaces set within spaces and so that I can get the whole world onto my shelf.