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.