For years I painted under the hard, brilliant light of South Africa, where I built my life as an artist. I settled in the Cotswolds two and a half years ago, and the light here is almost its opposite — soft, grey, unhurried, forever changing its mind. Learning to work in it has been like learning a second language, and it has made me a more patient looker.

My work begins there, in the looking. I spend long stretches simply watching a single bloom — a peony, an orchid, a branch of blossom — until the light finds it: a translucency where it passes through a petal, a glow that seems to rise from inside the flower rather than fall on it.

That glow catches me, and always has. Its beauty pulls me up short, and in the pause I slow down — I notice the smallest things, the turn of an edge, the fragile architecture of a stem — and come fully into the present moment. And the present moment is the only place I have found where true peace, joy and contentment live. Painting a flower is how I stay in that moment a little longer, and how I try to hold the doorway open for whoever stands before the finished work.

I keep the compositions deliberately spare — usually a single flower in dark, open space rather than crowded by setting — so the painting can breathe and the eye has somewhere to rest. I don't think of these as botanical studies. I make them as objects to live with: paintings meant to carry a measure of that quiet into the rooms they hang in.

Lately, that same attention has begun to draw me outward — beyond the single bloom, into the Cotswolds itself: its hills, hedgerows and wide, changing skies, lit by the soft light I came here to learn. The subject grows wider, but the way of seeing stays the same.

Now and then the looking arrives somewhere deeper — a moment when light, form and stillness align, and the ordinary world seems briefly charged with more than itself. Those are the moments that stop me. And those are the moments I paint.