Doing what comes naturally

My portfolio is irritatingly random. If you take into account all my work available to buy, it makes for a less than homogenous collection. House numbers, cards, aceo collectables and a huge range of sizes and subjects of painting done over many years. They appear all over the internet, and in local craft fairs and exhibitions.

It's difficult to keep a balance between what I find easy, what I like looking at and what I think will sell. I don't have the luxury of doing this for fun so it's never far from my mind.

My natural painting style is very recognisable in my larger work. I often start work with a strong idea of how I  want a painting to look, but it gets hijacked by my dominant painting style. Now and again I'm really happy with a piece of work and it's just how I imagined it.

When I began this painting, I had a set of photographs from salhouse broad to work from. I try really hard not to use my hipstamatic iphone camera as I know it's a lazy way of producing images to work from but I've isolated what it is that I really like about the pictures and it's quite a simple thing. It's the border around the picture- like old style photos. If you look through my sketchbooks you'll see that I draw little frames around everything. Not just for compositional reasons but because I like to see them contained. There's just something wonderful to me about a frame, I think I've struggled a lot with the current vogue for painted edge canvases. Slightly better for me if I paint the edges black or in a complementary colour because if you look from an angle the image is better contained.

In this painting I've taken advantage of the filters applied in the software and after a bit of colour adjustment (I'm battling an addiction to blue- all my landscapes want to be in blue and turquoise with a hint of pale ochre) I started with something to work from which almost already appeared to have a frame, without just drawing a line near the edge of the canvas and creating a border. Now it's really got an extra level of nostalgic feeling to it, it reminds me of dreams, and of those bizarre arcade machines I was obsessed with as a child where you paid 1p to look through a pinhole into a box where some curous and often disturbing scene would take place in a scale model toy setup. We were so easily entertained years ago!

I'm going to try really hard not to battle against my natural painting style and just see what happens. Maybe I'll end up with a collection of work which makes sense!

When it's dry it'll be for sale at Affordable British Art