Wanting to paint flowers and plants, wanting to paint at all, comes not from a sense of vanitas, but from a feeling of gratitude that there are such things, such light falling, such colour to be seen. Drawing them is a way of expressing the gratitude. I don’t want to draw flowers as perfect specimens if they are not; I don’t want to present nature as pretty and innocuous, when it is violent and splendid. As well as the joyous blue of a delphinium, for instance, I like tulips with the petals falling off, seed-heads, soaring hollyhocks, leaves with the teeth-marks of insects in them, black storms on bleak ground.

As soon as one puts any mark on a piece of paper, one is launching oneself into rhetoric, and to say that you are trying to rid your paintings of “meanings” is itself meaningless – even Malevich’s black square is laden with intent. To paint a picture and show it to anyone is to try to make contact with another human soul, and to do that, maybe one has to lay bare one’s own.

I was born in Manchester. I read English at Trinity College, Oxford and then did an M.Phil thesis on American fiction at St Andrews University. I was then sponsored by the Guardian to do a diploma in journalism at City University, dabbled in freelance writing for a little while, and then ran away to New York to be married and to work in a bookshop for six years, where I also sold lots of paintings. I had a daughter out there, and two more here, in Cambridge. My dad taught me to paint when I was little; I’ve been painting ever since. I undertake commissions, and I do artwork for book covers, chiefly, so far, for Cambridge University Press. I work mainly in watercolour, ink and intaglio printing. Some of my pictures are etchings in very small editions of ten or fewer. I print (with a lot of help) at St Barnabas Press.

This is a fairly small sample of my work. Please contact me if you are interested in these images or commissioned artwork, or seeing other work. Some are currently on view at Wicken Fen, the National Trust property in Cambridgeshire. If you need the images for commercial use, most are available through alamy.com.