I have been painting now for fifty years – previously in London and Edinburgh, and for the last four years in Aberfeldy. In the past I painted portraits and still-lifes in a realistic style, but for the last ten years or so my practice has changed quite radically to reflect my interests in spirituality. I now make two different kinds of painting in parallel: firstly, abstract stripe-paintings, quite minimalist but inspired by the local landscape; secondly, Christian icons in egg tempera.

Making the stripe paintings is for me a form of meditation. I paint sequences of vertical stripes freehand, without any use of straight edges or masking tape – the right hand half of the painting I do with my right hand, the left hand half with my left. The process is very simple and repetitive, but the important thing is to be fully present and attentive to the painting of each stripe, and to this end I usually try to synchronise the process with the rhythm of my breathing, i.e. the brush travels from top to bottom of the canvas in time with my outbreath.

I work in both oils and egg tempera – in both cases, the colours I mix are crucial to the specific feeling generated by each painting. For the most part these colours are remembered from walking in the Scottish landscape, and are intended to evoke a specific time of year or time of day. One of my artistic influences is Harris Tweed! – the colours are ‘extracted’ from the natural environment, but I want to use them to make satisfying abstract designs, not pictures or ‘views’.

More occasionally, I also paint Christian icons using the traditional egg tempera technique, which I learnt from two teachers during my PhD studies at the University of Edinburgh. In these the drawing and composition are more or less faithful to the tradition, but there is a greater freedom in the choice of colours, and what I find in my case is that the colours of the landscape (and my stripe-paintings) tend to pervade the icons as well, usually in translucent layers.

My studio is a free-standing garage conversion in our garden on the edge of Aberfeldy, which was completed last year and which I am really enjoying as a dedicated work-space. Besides my painting, I also work as a lecturer in art history, both at Edinburgh University and, more recently and occasionally, in the ‘Talking Pictures’ series at the Birks Cinema in Aberfeldy as well!