'Before deciding to become an artist, I obtained a University degree in Geology. I only worked for one year in that profession before taking a leap of faith and becoming wholly self-employed as a wildlife and landscape painter. But my four years studying for my BSc. in Geology also required university level mathematics, chemistry and physics, but not art - something that I was naturally good at but had ignored. Once, when caught doodling when I should have been listening, an irritated lecturer declared that, “Art and science are two separate disciplines!” In physics, when the scientific nature of light was dealt with, I was fascinated, but generally I was an unenthusiastic student. Unwittingly, and unbeknown to either me or them, my professors were actually training me for a very different profession - and it was not geology! It was art and painting which I now understand are the same thing sometimes. Art is a science and science is an art. By graduation time I had a total understanding of the structure of our planet, the cosmos and the nature of reality. So, when I left University I had dormant within me the knowledge needed by any painter of the natural world. I had been trained to look at any landscape and understand its formation on a geological time scale (billions of years) with scientific accuracy. Conversely, when it came to recreating (in a couple of weeks) a landscape on canvas, I could easily do so from first principles, with my geologist’s eye warning me when paint did not reflect reality.
Mountains are visually defined by physics and geology, and so I find them very exciting to paint. When walking in the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland and looking for red deer, I could almost see the long-since departed glacial ice sheet carving out the landscape we see today, with its weathered granites and schists, relict valleys, moraines and tarn lakes. And I saw it all with a scientific understanding of light, especially ‘aerial’ perspective - the way things become bluer and lose contrast with distance. Whoever said that art and science are two separate disciplines?'

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