"Something of a contemplation on French painting and its influence on my visual sensibilities using the slow process of large format photography while relaxing in a French garden.

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has two paintings by Pissarro which I first encountered as a teenager on what I assume was a school visit. This was around the time I also had an Athena print of Monet’s Poppies on my bedroom wall - alongside various Roger Dean’s. These Pissarro paintings must have resonated and over the years bubbled away under my consciousness while considering myself more interested in other things. It is now later in live I realise the impact they and French Impressionsim made. However, one Pissarro painting uppermost in my mind when making these photographs was Cabbage Field Pointoise 1873 in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid. (Although I know this work only

from reproduction.)"