For me, painting landscape truthfully is as much about touch as vision, as much about intuition and memory as conscious thought and decision. It requires intuitive, gestural and organic mark-making, reproducing the actions of nature, adjusting and re-adjusting to every previous mark, responding to colour relationships and ideas that have gone before in order to build up a constructed experiential landscape. Thus moments are layered, melting one into the next, just as a landscape is seen from a distance, approached, and ultimately consumed. These layered, transient, seen and felt moments, when transformed through the painting process, are intended to engender a prolonged engagement with the painting as a mediated experience of landscape. Mark-making is not depictive of landscape but like landscape: if the paint is metaphor, the marks are simile. In the studio, rather than directly in front of the landscape, I can paint under the influence of the memory’s interpretation of the living landscape – the ‘soul-yearning’ which is a response to more than what is manifest only to the eye.