Up to this point, I have mainly concentrated on portraiture, but for this exhibition I wanted to focus on the figure in an interior setting. Some of these paintings feature Charleston in East Sussex, the country home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury circle. It’s somewhere I visit often and am always inspired by how beautiful it is. Duncan Grant’s studio is particularly wonderful so I couldn’t resist using that as a setting for some of my compositions.

I hired a lovely room in Montmartre for a month in the spring where I painted a lot of this work. I wanted to see how being in a completely different and concentrated environment would change the way I worked. My days took on such a wonderful simplicity that I haven’t experienced since I first started out as a painter so it’s something I intend to find space for from now on.

I love cats and so wanted them to play a significant part in this exhibition too. I love their distanced companionship, calculated indifference, and their often-otherworldly presence, so the people I painted for this exhibition are all cat owners (that’s if you ever really own a cat) and I wanted to explore that relationship within the paintings.

Myrtle, who features in two of these works, died while I was putting this exhibition together so it would be fitting to dedicate this to the best and wisest little familiar that my wife and I could have hoped to have crossed paths with.