How does the commissioning process work?

A lot of it is by word of mouth and people sort of find me, as it were, and I prefer it that way.

And when someone gets in touch, they say, "I'd like to find out about having one of your paintings." And the first thing is, uh, really about size, uh, whether they want something quite large, which can be about five foot high or five foot across, or maybe about two and a half foot wide is usually the sort of smaller size.

So we get down to those sorts of brass tacks, and then I'll say, "Well, I'll come and visit you." That allows me to come and visit the, the land and the place, and that might be, sometimes I've done places in, in cities or in urban places, which might just be a garden.

Uh, but most often it's someone's estate or it's a small farm or someone's, you know, it can be a two thousand acre estate or something like that.

So we'll sit at a table and we'll work out what the history of their relationship with the land is and what they like about it, what, how they behave with it, whether they walk the land, what their favorite places are, what their interests are, whether it's sometimes people are into their sporting, their fishing, their shooting and those sorts of things.

How they use it, whether family uses it, whether they use it every day, and whether it's involving other people using it and those sorts of thingsAnd what the history of it is with their family, whether their grandfather dug a lake, and is that particularly important? Whether they're, you know, they, they wander around the garden.

And you have all this stored information, but suddenly your artistic sense, that feeling that you've got to put a stab of paint here, it, it is kind of, in a way, it's kind of fighting the other, isn't it?