It’s logical in the winter, or when it’s raining, to paint indoors, but painting indoors means thinking indoors which means your attitude to solving problems and developing ideas is influenced by the studio atmosphere with controllable lighting and flexible timing where you can work independent of external events. The imagination thinks differently to when painting outside where the light changes by the minute: a cloud passes obscuring the sun. Time is not flexible but spontaneous and, you’re never alone. You paint a nice blue sky and before you know it there’s a poor little fly dragging it’s wings through the paint. Bees buzz around the yellow paint on the pallet, ants are crawling up your leg, a hungry mosquito bites your ear and an irritating dog keeps barking at you, jumping up, knocking your pallet over and trying to eat your tubes of paint. But that’s life. Life is alive and not artificial, and therefore interesting; we’re not AI robots, we’re animals just like the dog, the flies, the bees and the mosquitos.

As I was painting I became aware that I was intruding, or was part of the lives of others. One day when I was looking at the colours something wizzed past me a few metres from where I was standing, it took me a few seconds to realize it was a deer and then two dogs ran after it. Naughty dogs! Fifteen minutes later the deer wizzed past again but without the dogs, it had escaped. Phew. Over the days I was painting I was amazed by how many friends I had, so many insects came to say “Hello” and some stayed to rest in the sun and became future models in the painting. Lizards are remarkable, dragonflies are majestic, ants are fascinating, scorpions are mini dinosaurs and all are wonderful. I also realized that what connects all of us is that they too, if they aren’t vegetarians, are violent and hunt, fight, defeat and (fortunately we don’t) eat their victims to survive. The difference between them and us is that we have mechanized the killing with filthy weapons.