I was crazy about flowers as a teenager, I wore flowery hippy dresses out of school hours. I painted my steel toe capped dr. martins, which I wore to school, one was purple with yellow daisies, the other blue with orange daisies. Every spare minute I had was spent in the art room painting flowers. Fortunately my dress sense has changed somewhat, as has my painting.

Twenty years on I still have a passion for flowers although I suspect I now see them through very different eyes. There is an unimaginable beauty and fragility to a flower, an intangibility, an inconsistency, this is the nature of nature. Nothing is ever the same from one moment to the next yet everything is cyclical. I am intrigued by the imminence of death and the challenge of life, the mystery we are to ourselves.

The backgrounds of the paintings, behind the flowers are mainly modelled on trees. A trees tells its own story, it has marks to reveal its age, a tree can be mossy, mottled, scratched, pecked at, cut, leaky, it may have scores and other markings to reveal the life it has weathered.

Combining clues to the fleeting delicate radiance of a flower in its prime with shadows, scaring, scoring and the ageing processes of a tree, I am finding a parallel with the quandary of human existence in its psychological, emotional, spiritual and physical states.

There will always be hope. There will always be passing moments of joy, happiness, love, light, kindness, beauty and unexpected delights in life. Amidst these though there will be pain, struggles, troubles, difficulties and darkness. This is what makes us who we are. This what makes a tree a tree, a flower a flower; a life a life.

The compositional make up of this work came about whilst I was daydreaming. I was sitting on the floor in my studio contemplating meditation, staring at a greetings card on the wall. The picture was of a weathered stone, seated Buddha with a couple of bright pink flower petals on one of his knees. I had a moment of clarity. The feeling I got, at this moment from this seemingly insignificant greetings card was the feeling I wanted to portray in my paintings. However that moment was just that, a moment, and as I have worked with each painting it has tended to dictate itself as to its finished appearance, often being far removed from my initial intention. It is important for me to keep this memory alive though as it was the spark that lit a new path for this artist.