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When I returned from India in 1990, after an eighteen-month scholarship, London became one of the principal sources for my imagery. Walking around my local area provided me with two fascinating arterial routes in the Regent’s Canal and Westway motorway structure. Both were then decrepit and insalubrious sites, marginal landscapes. Two problems occurred to me as I drew these unregardeded wastelands; how did one avoid becoming a topographical illustrator when it was often the specific details of a place that appealed? And if romanticism located beauty and the sublime in the picturesque or monumental aspects of landscape, could the mundane, urban elements of the city not also become a trigger for transformative experience?

In 1993 Michael Samuelson commissioned the first of a series of Gasworks paintings, which would later be shown at the Museum of London. This project provided the breakthrough, enabling me to see London’s light as an expressive subject matter in its own right. The subtle qualities of London’s atmosphere - dull pewter greys, milky Naples yellows, or the nocturnal, saturated contrasts of dirty sodium tangerine oranges and bruised purple skies - could create an infinite variety of moods.

Recently I have moved away from pan vision landscape vistas to close-up fragments of architecture and spaces. These intimate worlds are almost still lives, micro mise en scène
visions.