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 (up to 4ft by 3ft/122cm by 91cm) canvas.
Working from a mixture of memory and photographs, I usually focus on one small area – a limpet-covered rock, the trunk of a tree – and this becomes my micro-landscape with its own topography. Sometimes I take a step back and take in a larger landscape.
Features within it are stylised to varying degrees, sometimes to the point where they appear completely abstract. I occasionally add flourishes and motifs - sometimes with a folk-art or Art Nouveau feel - as well.
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: very often dark violet, which is the shade I associate with deepest shadow, although sometimes silver, and more recently I have experimented with outlining each block in a different colour.