I’ll come out and admit it straight away - my paintings usually rely a lot on photo reference. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise as they have that ‘photographic’ feel about them. Sometimes I feel somewhat guilty about this. It’s something that stopped me dead in my tracks in earlier years - ‘you’re no artist because you work from photos’. But I’ve come to the conclusion, quite late in life, that I want to paint, and I’ll do whatever it takes to paint, and if that means using photos, so...

Are nice pictures of things I’ve seen what I really want to paint, or am I hiding my inner self?

I have this great fear of posting on Instagram, Facebook etc. Even on my own website, hence the lack of blogs this year. But it’s something everybody says an artist must do if you want to find your audience and let them see your work. In my pre-artist days (only about five years ago), I tended to be a social media refusenik, avoiding it because I thought my life was too dull to share with anybody else. I also worried that it would become a great way to waste time. But finally I accepted that...