Painting is an intimate thing. You pour yourself into the colour and shapes and brushstrokes and you can see the rightness -and the wrongness – at every turn. You can get overwhelmingly lost inside the image and colour so that at night they all dance in your head. But when it is right and when you sit and look you can get right inside the picture and be there, down in the weeds and roots or up there looking down on valleys and crags. Maybe this is how all artists feel I don’t know but there is something else that I hadn’t expected. When I paint I tend to listen to music and somehow the melody and notes I hear get embedded into what I’m painting. So this tree, that distant peak, that area of snow has, even after the work is done, a little song of its own.