This has been a year of two studios - a spacious and airy purpose-built space at Llety Caws in Cwmerfyn, once the workplace of the great painter Heinz Koppel and loaned to me by my friend Pip, and a tiny makeshift studio at Penparc Cottage in Aberporth, where the furniture has been pushed back to accommodate a small painting table and a chair. Both of these are rooms with views.
The former is set in hill-farm country outside Aberystwyth, all high horizons and vaulting skies. The latter overlooks our brick-pathed cottage garden, with the beach and the wide expanse of Cardigan Bay beyond.

The landscapes are engraved on my mind's eye, and have come out in the paintings in forms that heighten and confuse concrete reality - for me they echo those strangely transformed and potent dream landscapes that one regularly revisits in sleep. It's been an unsettled year, and I've absorbed myself by arranging and painting familiar objects as though on a stage, engaging them in a sort of visual dialogue with each other in these locations. Vessels and sculptures that I have made with Pip in her ceramic workshop have migrated with me between the studios, and taken central roles in many of the paintings. I've found the order and calm of the resulting still-life dramas oddly comforting at a time of disruption and change.