I the pleasure of walking across the Scottish island of Iona, in a fantastic all changing light; hail, rain, snow, brilliant sunshine everything in flux, when I discovered this ram buried in shells. I was reminded of Holman Hunt’s ‘The Scapegoat,’ this seeming to be a vision, one step along; life fossilized, glinting eternally, in sublime decay.

This painting is essentially the reconstruction of my late brother, Jamie's ghost. He caught a large flatfish (lemon sole in the painting) foul hooked through through the eye, as a young boy fishing with me on the sea shore at Arnside, Cumbria. Here he returns, in his prime to shed some light on the nature of a cruel fate. The cause of my brother’s death aged 20 still remains mysterious.

Dazzling January sunlight as we approached Dungeness, as I stopped the car alerted to the light shadows across a seemingly eternal field of sheep. I asked Tania to pose, somewhere between counting and praying, at which point she put on my sunglasses in which I am reflected painting her, perhaps in a balance of desire and hope.

Gouache on Paper on board. The story of this painting was relayed to me by a housekeeper in the Dordogne, southwest France, a narrative on the secularized cruelty of rural life.

I studied the micro life of the lizards in Victoria’s rose garden in the Dordogne; here escaping its own semiology, a mythically large specimen, in cadmium red, scutters up the crumbling wall.

Mirage was a reflection on French motorway culture as well as the legacy of French painting; the holistic experience of Van Gogh’s midi, now somehow negotiated by a world of signs and divisions seen here at high speed, unified by a running hare through the Mirage.

This is a good look at the art going public, coming into the National Portrait Gallery from a Summer downpour in a never ending whirl of interest.

This group of revelers woke me up in the middle of the night passing beneath my bedroom window, so I photographed them and then improvised their features from a very blurry photo in paint, hopefully forming an eternal random network.

I had the pleasure of walking across Bedford Park in Essex in a massive summer wind storm, the many willows rocking. The speed of my painted gestures in response seemed to suggest life from the point of view of this racing queen bee.

This painting began as a journey to the gates of Hades. Three years later I found my bearings, beside the River Clyde, studying the revelry of the local pier divers, which I improvised into the painting.

Not in gallery

It was just so surprising; a beautiful shock, as this heron, highlighted in white electric light flew under Vauxhall Bridge as l walked by.

Exhibition title for recent show with Alice Cescatti

I imagined my environmentalist friend Mia Manners, dancing the dance of life before a translucent city of the future, built on a volcanic chasm, sometime after the fall of the nations.