I’m drawn to impressionist artists such as Claude Monet Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, John Singer Sargent, Alfred Sisley and many others who enjoyed painting outside, because of their use of delicate lines and muted colours, lucidly portraying the transience of the natural world. Like Impressionist artists, I paint very simply what I see, think and feel and I don’t seek perfection in visual appearances. Instead, I have an “impression” of how a landscape, thing, or person appears to me at a certain moment in time. I love to emulate JMW Turner and the way he uses the contrasting mediums of watercolour and oils in the same paintings to create dramatic skies and seascapes. I’m also drawn to surrealist artists like Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo who fascinate me in terms of their life history and their paintings. Their art is grown out of the pains and passions they experienced in life and their work incorporates flora and fauna alongside aspects of humanity which is something that I like to explore in my work. . 

However, I am more closely aligned with the figurative, representational style of Modernist and Expressionist artists. My style has been likened to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Stanley Spencer in the way they use bold colours, evoke dark moods and create figurative shapes and stylised human forms. The baroque, symmetrical, decorative style of Rousseau, Morris and Klimt are a favourite influence. Morris because he was an exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement and showed how art can be in everyday objects and Klimt because of how the decorative element emerges effortlessly from his work. My Nature paintings are perhaps most closely related in style to Rousseau whose so-called naive art belies the beauty of his paintings which is evident in the fact that they are created from imagination. Layers of plants and animals are superimposed like a story or dream and using real objects to create a different reality in a painting is a prominent feature of my work. Like the American Expressionist painter, Alice Neel, I like to focus on single objects, still life or imagined scenes consisting of real-life items. My philosophy and techniques are akin to those of the Post-Impressionist artists like Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Picasso who preferred to work in the studio and experiment with different styles. One such artist is Vincent van Gogh whose use of bold, vibrant colours and expressive brushstrokes are the inspiration for many of my artworks. His florals fascinate me because as a viewer I am guided around the shapes and silhouettes of the flowers which makes them very beautiful.