Two years ago, when I began preparing work for Hervé and the Wolf: Saints and their Beasts, I had intended to focus on the little-known saint of my title. Hervé is revered in Brittany, where he's a 'people's saint', unrecognised by the Catholic Church. Led initially by the story of his Welsh parentage, I soon found myself irresistibly drawn to the blind boy-saint whose dog was eaten by a wolf which thereafter became his constant companion and his eyes. To this day the chapel and fountain dedicated to Hervé in Gourin is a place of pilgrimage for those seeking the saint's intervention in the healing of animals, particularly horses.

I've long been interested in the stories of animals which changed their nature - Herve's wolf, Elijah's raven and Francis' flock of birds. Hervé continues to fascinate me. He's provided me with a rich narrative source, and I'm not through with painting him just yet. But exhibitions take on a life of their own in the studio, and during the process of gestation I found myself constantly re-visiting three great artists who had produced iconic and haunting images of another, more famous saint: Andrea Mantegna, Paolo Uccello and Bernardo Martorell.

A postcard of Martorell's sublime Saint George Slaying the Dragon was pinned to my easel for the duration while I grappled with my own Green George, and I borrowed his compositional devices unhesitatingly. Sometimes artists 'take on' a master, challenging and re-working a great painting. While I balk at the notion of 'taking on' Martorell, I feel I have been enjoying a 'dance' with him over the past six months.

I studied Mantegna's ravishing painting of a winged and triumphant Saint George at the Accademia in Venice, and the description of the painting that I made in my notebook (oddly divergent from the original, I found out later), formed the inspiration for Flight of Swallows Over the Field of Gold.

Uccello was the most mystical of my three masters, with his extraordinary vision of an armoured George and mount bearing down like a tank on a dragon tethered delicately on a leash by a fashionably-dressed young woman. It was the wonderful strangeness of this painting which gave me license to explore my own approaches to the story.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, 2007