The verdant slopes of the Eastern Cape's Amathole Mountains and vast dry expanses of the Great Karoo were childhood inspirations urging me to observe, draw and model. Above our farm garden-oasis, a vast crystalline blue sky, sometimes bursting with cumulus-headed thunderstorms of spectacular drama. Dusty earth and shimmering skies - primal textures, scents and light. Nature's forms and vibrating colours are my guides. Especially the powerful sculptural qualities of a blossom or seedpod. Drawing attention to exquisite metaphors for our own, transient Earth presence, in the face of man's unbalanced exploitation of nature. I focus on rare, often endangered flowers and plants living on our planet, magnifying fascinating, tiny details. Aided by photographs, I portray these on canvas in translucent oil glazes or on paper in watercolour and powdery coloured pencil. I adore thick, luxurious, handcrafted paper or fine linen canvas made in traditional mills. With pure, organic materials, and cured during natural drying processes, my painted oil surfaces develop a supple luminance resisting crackling. Varnishes are satin/matt or dammar/glossy. My work is based on drawing, is slow and artisanal, uses the very best materials and strives for technical mastery. I care about beauty, detail and sophistication - just like nature. Artisanship allows me to position my gift of seeing the outer world differently - as a way of living and being, engaging tactilely, physically with the world. As an ordinary person wanting to do extraordinary things, my artistic purpose is to develop a powerful body of work that leaves a lasting impact on viewers. I attempt a poetic, drawn commentary on the originality of natural forms. *'One way to conceive what artists do is to think that they are, in their own way, running advertising campaigns—not for anything expensive or usually even available for purchase, but for the many things that are at once of huge human importance and yet constantly in danger of being forgotten. In the early part of the twenty-first century, for example, the English artist David Hockney ran a major advertising campaign for trees. At the start of the sixteenth century, the German painter Albrecht Dürer launched a comparable campaign around the value of grass.' For the Love of Art: Alain de Botton on Art as Therapy, Sotheby's, April 14, 2020 ** 'Contemporary plant portraiture, a hybrid genre with a complex history, is located within both botany as a scientific discipline, and art as a transformative visual practice' South African Botanical Art: Peeling back the Petals: Marion Arnold, 2001