These are the stems of the birch in early spring. I was happy when I found a way of transforming the blunt, heavy marks of the lithographic pencil into these fine lines. Looking closely, you can almost feel the slim branches as you follow them across the plate. As I was making this print minute buds emerged, and by the end the stems were alive with fresh green leaves.

Lithography feels sympathetic to the way I work. You think you are in control, but the sensitive plates reveal things that have been forgotten about during the course of platemaking such as the rubbed out border in this one.

In the evening as the light fades, the dark lines of plants appear drawn into the sky. I am accustomed to working outside - I see wonderful things but time is short. The thing seen is so fleeting, and drawing is intuitive. It’s interesting to me that by contrast, printmaking is methodical, slow, permanent and reproducible.

This is more directly related to a particular place - the home of a significant writer – a house embedded in the natural world.  I felt that by depicting its windows, and losing many of the other ‘facts’  that it took on something of a human  presence. A sense of looking out and beyond. The lithographic process was instrumental in leaving me free to do this.