ver the years, in my quest to express my reaction to anything I found beautiful, I mastered various subjects from portraiture to the nude, from still life to interiors and so on. My ambition was to eventually incorporate all, or as many as possible, of these subjects into single works. The first time I achieved this was in "The Hookah," a painting that I love every much which I did in Rajhastan; it incorporates portraiture, drapery, still-life and the landscape. The second time was with a far more ambitious work, the life-size "Bathsheba," which I painted in Bali, with my pregnant wife as the model. It incorporates portraiture, the nude, still-life and the interior Since then, I became a surrealist, and so create works now all the time that incorporate at last, all the subjects, particularly landscape and the nude.
While I have painted the landscape less than other subjects, that is no indication whatsoever as to my attitude to a genre that I truly love. Few people have as much opportunity to see, let alone paint, amazingly beautiful landscape as much as myself, for I have tried - and often succeeded - to live in spectacularly beautiful places, from the old Mill in Tuscany to the present Paradise on top of a mountain in South India. Rather than simply paint the landscape around me however, I am delighted to now find myself veering off into my imagination, and incorporating my "local" landscapes into my surreal compositions. The landscapes shown on this website therefore, are backgrounds to large and elaborate compositions, but I show them for two reasons. First because I am anxious to avoid always using the same works as have already appeared in my book, wishing to give those who already own it a chance to see something different. That is the main reason I am not showing my more conventional landscapes here. And secondly, simply because I find these so beautiful, and believe they might sometimes be missed in the regarding of the whole work of which they are a mere detail.
