Most of my paintings are of my children, as I had a notion that I might record their growing up … their childhood and the relatives that peopled it. So I suppose it’s a sort of family album. A long term project that may occupy me for years.

Recently, I’ve started a series of nudes. I like painting skin, and when you can make oil and pigment into flesh … it’s very rewarding. Like alchemy. Or the Eucharist.

I work from life. Can’t see the point otherwise.

I like painters who do the same – who don’t use optics or cameras or other mechanical tools but rely on the fallible eye.

Euan Uglow, William Coldstream and Stanley Spencer’s ‘Leg o’ mutton’ nudes are important to me, as are Orpens early works and that whole Twentieth Century British figurative thing, including Lucien Freud.

I work in oil paint on canvas / board / paper and watercolours, more recently.