This painting “My Secret Place” took me a ridiculous two years to complete, in an age where i’ve heard artists boast that they like to finish a piece in one sitting. I will admit that even for me this time scale was a bit over the top, as most of my work can take a few day’s or weeks at most. My point of view is that your art piece is finished when you think it’s finished and the truth for me is, my paintings are never finished, I can always see somehting else that can be in there and i have to fight myself to stop going over the top.

I was born brought up and still live in Scotland but when i was about seven my mother took me to her homeland which was Sicily. And in my grown up mind and in my happy memory as i remember it, this painting depicts one of the places she took me to visit. It seemed an ancient and magical place. We sat on the grass listening to the whistling birds and watching the river flow away into the distance as we had our picnic.