Handmade lithographs - printed at Northern Print Studio, North Sheilds and at the former Lowick House Print Workshop, Cumbria.

In the spring of 1996, whilst working away at Lowick House Print Workshop for a couple of weeks, I was trying, unsuccessfully, to print a flat green as a first colour for a lithograph of a hillside with two trees. As is often the case with printmaking and all its tricky processes, it wasn't going how I'd hoped. I couldn't get the ink to print as I wanted - I was doing something wrong. In frustration I went for a long walk over the nearby fells. Just before getting back to the workshop it occurred to me that, with this image, I wasn't particularly interested in the ground below the line of the hill . . . and Couple (i) (see foot of this page) and a great many more similarly minimal lithographs were born!

In the mid 1990s I enjoyed a three month residency on the Falkland Islands. I feel sure that the vast open space of the South Atlantic is somewhere behind these pictures, but then so too is the landscape of east Cumbria where I live and work. On overcast days the powerful presence of Cross Fell diminishes and birds and trees take on a greater significance. The many thousands of thorn trees are truly wonderful in their great variety of shapes and sizes - some gnarled and bent by the elements and others with seemingly charmed lives.