Under my painting name of Rosebay, I make big, vibrant canvases, drawing on elements of pop art, graffiti art and cartography to celebrate some of the unsung corners of the natural world.
I use marker pens filled with acrylic paint, as I find them the quickest and most direct way of filling a large (usually 4ft by 3ft/122cm by 91cm) canvas.
Working from a mixture of memory and photographs, I focus on one small area – a limpet-covered rock, the trunk of a tree – and this becomes my micro-landscape with its own topography.
Features within it are stylised to varying degrees, sometimes to the point where they appear completely abstract. Simple forms, such as the white circles representing barnacles, are often repeated many times.
My paintings sometimes resemble maps: those water channels or rock striations can look like roads, patches of seaweed like green parks in a city. It adds to the feeling of a landscape where observers can lose themselves.
I like to exaggerate and intensify colours – as well as making everything more vivid, it takes my work a further step away from ‘reality’, which I like. Each block of colour is delineated by a border of dark violet, which is the shade I associate with deepest shadow.