I paint what I cannot stop looking at — the moment light breaks across a mountain face, the way a storm gathers itself above a valley, the stillness of a landscape holding its breath between weather systems. For me, painting is not about reproducing what I see so much as it is about trying to stay present with what I feel when I see it.

I work primarily in oil on canvas for my colour work, and in charcoal or sepia on watercolour paper and linen when I turn to monochrome. Each medium asks something different of me. Oil allows me to build slowly, to layer warmth into shadow and find the temperature of light as it moves across rock and cloud. Charcoal and sepia strip that away — they demand honesty, and a willingness to let structure and tone do the work that colour cannot. Together, these two bodies of work feel like two ways of listening to the same conversation.

That conversation is, at its heart, about light. Not light as a technical problem to solve, but light as the living tissue of our relationship with the world around us. Light is how the world reaches us — it is what allows us to see, but more than that, it is what makes us feel seen by the landscape itself. When I stand before the Drakenstein Mountains at dusk, or watch low winter sun rake across the Boland valley floor, I am not separate from what I'm witnessing. I am part of it. The painting becomes my attempt to articulate that belonging.

This is also why I am drawn to the idea of holism — to the understanding that we are not observers standing outside of nature, but threads woven into it. Every painting I make is, in some way, an exploration of that interconnectedness: the ongoing dialogue between what is inside us and what surrounds us, between the particular and the vast, between a single ray of light and the universe it briefly illuminates. The landscape I return to again and again — It is a conversation partner. And I am still learning how to listen.