The Cornish landscape is my most important motivation, especially the less pretty and remote places
- and there are still remote places in Cornwall, although you have to seek them out. I am usually attracted to the 'unnoticed' beauty of places, and to the discarded and derelict; corners of fields, buildings returning to nature and little used lanes.
I have 'touchstone' landmarks as I drive or walk, a particular tree or building or curve of a hill that I look forward to seeing whenever I pass.
Another influence and motivation is my farming childhood, the freedom to rome over fields and play in orchards and buildings witnessing life and death surrounded by the farm animals and listening to my father's, often quite surreal, stories about his childhood. I never quite knew where the past ended and the present began. The worlds of his youth and mine somehow melded together. I still draw on that gift of a childhood, in my work, all the time.