"This is a painting I started shortly after moving from Los Angeles to rural Scotland in 2024, after a lifetime of wanting to live in the country. We share this area with our farming neighbours, and it’s a ‘triumphant’ portrait of me taking out the communal bins, in peak competence and usefulness, where I’m otherwise fairly unskilled and have little to offer.

I’m standing, elated, after living my entire life in drought conditions and urban sprawl, wearing wellies in puddles. After I had started the painting, I watched helplessly from afar as my former home endured the terrible fires. So, it’s with more gratitude than ever I do this each week.

I’ve done series of portraits in which the setting became an extension the sitter, and continue to explore that in my work, with the environments giving more context to the sitter’s inner life. The style was heavily influenced by the German ‘New Objectivity’ paintings of the 1920s."