Materials Only artist's quality materials are used in the process of creating these paintings. Supplied from manufacturers that have been creating their own products, to the highest standards, for hundreds of years. That said, anything becomes a tool to deliver paint onto the surface. The end result is paramount and along the way many brushes, wire mesh, rubber cutouts and rags have been used against the purpose that they may have been intended, simply for the delight in the visual effects their manipulation has created. Creativity Painting's are collections of decisions - great paintings are collections of the right choices. So each stroke is a step either away or towards that ideal. No pressure! For me, each painting is an experiment in technique. I'm interested in travelling down a new road – I usually get lost, but from the journey back a painting emerges and along the way, I have learnt something about my craft. To move paint around, to layer it, has endless fascination for me. Athlete's have endorphins – I have oil paint! Part of my ambition as an artist is to express emotion and thought simultaneously. The best way to do this for me is by picking up a brush and recording onto canvas peripheral impluses and reflections of my circumstances. I'm also interested in our national identity, how we see ourselves as New Zealand people. We share collective idealogies that we may not individually have an intimate knowledge of, none the less, they are our idiosyncrasies, our character. Perhaps an heirloom from our colonial past. Who are your influences? It's hard to state, it becomes really difficult to say which artists have had the greatest influence on my work, easier to mention artist's that I admire: Jenny Saville, Velasquez, Daumier, Degas, Lucien Freud, Toulouse-Lautrec, Stanley Palmer and Andrew Wyeth, but there are many more.