I have spent most of my life living in the countryside, or seeking the wild places where the veil between the worlds of spirit and faery is thinner. I have always painted using nature as my inspiration. I try to combine the symbolic and dynamic worlds of folklore and mythology, with the ecology and natural history of the subjects I illustrate.

A photograph of an ancient willow tree.	In the top left corner of the photo there is the face of a baby formed from the bark, can you see it?	Here is a scan of a page from my sketch book.

At the time the photograph above was taken I was living in a lovely green caravan next to a thick hawthorn hedge on the edge of a birch woodland, and from my desk I could see a wren's nest, with its tiny occupants being fed, and learning to fly.( It was easy not to get much work done while this was happening). During this time I had a dream of meeting a wren who transformed into a tiny woman, a faery, and later discovered that there are many folktales about the ability of the wren to change into female form. A year or two later in the Spring when I was in labour with my first child, a wren appeared in the hawthorn hedge, looked in at me from outside the window and sang her tiny heart out. My daughter was named Jenny Fae, after Jenny Wren.

During Jenny's first year I painted the "Green Man", spirit of the forest, and this painting included a wren and a robin, representing the two halves of the year. The wren is symbolically re-born at the Summer Solstice, being the feminine principle, and signifying the returning of the dark, longer nights. The robin represents the solar, masculine, aspect, the returning of the sun at the Winter Solstice. Many of my paintings since then have included the wren and the robin ( sometimes hidden in an image), and although I can only say this with hindsight,( as it wasn't planned that way!) - it was poetic that I should have a son, Aidan ("little flame"), last Autumn.

I have been sharing this in an attempt to explain how the natural world influences my life and work. I love the connection between past mythologies and folklore and the present, the way those old stories have an uncanny way of weaving themselves into daily life, until they are somehow transformed once more and reborn as new tales each generation.We can surely only marvel at the complexity and intricacies of the natural world, the web of life to which we ourselves owe our very existence. I feel that we have all lost so much with our modern mechanistic materialistic focus, so many of us living with our backs to nature, away from knowledge of the Earth who bore us, and away from the magic that can inspire our imaginations to grow and seek out changes. I hope that in however small a way my paintings can be part of those inspirations.