We’ve all been there. You meet someone new, polite conversation begins, and then the question arrives:
“So, what do you do?”

These days, I can just about manage to say, without tripping over the words, “I’m an artist.”
It’s taken me a while to get there, I’ll admit. Saying it out loud once felt oddly vulnerable — as though I needed to justify it, explain it, soften it somehow. Now I say it more easily, though the response is often the same:

“Oh, how lovely — you must spend all day painting.”

Most of my paintings begin without a clear destination.

I might start with a remembered place, a particular quality of light, or the feeling of weather moving through a landscape — but rarely with a fixed image in mind. Over the years, I’ve learned that not knowing where a piece is going isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a space to work within.