Though I've said it many times - here I go again - the philosophy, the raison d'etre...

  I'd seen Auckland painted so many times, but never the way I thought it could be painted.  I wanted to work in the mad mix of Edwardian shop fronts, old villas, with the sub-tropic fauna and volcanoes.  And instead of having the usual one viewpoint thing - how about multiple viewpoints?  A painting with a dozen different vanishing points?   So I've tried to  make paintings that are like a memory of a day's travel - not just the view fro one standpoint which has been, let's face it, done to death.  I chose old cars because they looked better, not from any nostalgia.  I used acrylic paint because it dries quickly and lends itself to the graphic, hard-colour quality I wanted.  I guess the main influences here were Russian and Greek folk-Art, The American Regionalists, and somewhere in there...  old board game covers.   The first one here was finished in 2006, but I still do them, though not often.  I still keep meaning to say goodbye to the whole thing with one or two very large, 'goodbye' kind of pieces.    Summing up pieces, as it were.  We'll see.