Since last year, when I found a little house in France, our lives have changed. Robert has sold his ballooning business to Virgin (www.ballooningintuscany.com) and so we have decided to put our mill on the market and move to this lovely corner of SW France for another new adventure.

The French markets are full of beautiful local produce, which gives me exciting material for still-life, while the landscape is a new challenge for me with fast-changing weather and clouds soaring over a Constable-like countryside. Golden Limousin cows, sheep and huge trees fill the landscape and there is not an olive tree in sight! However, Italy is still deep within my soul and I shall continue to paint there, from time to time, during the year.

I started my working life as a graphic designer in publishing, which led me to illustrating children's books, but after three or four years in London I took off to Florence in 1976 because I wanted to follow my main love, which has always been painting. There in Florence, I started life drawing with Patrick Hamilton in his Santa Croce studio and also with Signorina Simi in her wonderful turn of the century studio, which had belonged to her father Filadelfo Simi who was a painter in the time of the Macchiaioli. This experience made such an impression on me, that when I was offered a house-sit in a private home near Siena I grabbed the opportunity for a year's painting, which led to a love affair with the region and a life in Tuscany.

I am a figurative painter, because I find so much in what I observe to be exciting. I find nothing so lovely as setting up my easel in the middle of a field, faraway from people and trying to paint what I see before me. I also love my time in the studio, working in the tranquillity of that environment, painting still-life or finishing the paintings that I started outside. Painting is a wonderful continuing puzzle for me, because as soon as I think I've resolved a problem, I find I am back there again trying to sort out yet another one and this is strangely addictive.

As Degas said, “To be an artist, you have to be as cunning as a thief.”

Join my adventure on my blog Earth, Wind, Fire.