March 2020, I was in the middle of an exhibition and had been looking forward to starting the Porthmeor Programme at the St Ives School of Painting in May.  By the middle of our week-long show, we’d had just one visitor, and we took the decision to close a few days early.  Two days later the UK officially went into Lockdown, which was initially expected to last 7 weeks.  As the realisation hit me that my trip to St Ives would not be happening, I decided that it would be nice to use some of my time in lockdown to finally ‘do something’ with my extensive library of photographs and use them to take a virtual trip to St Ives. 

Each day I would select one or more of my photos of St Ives from past visits and take a few moments, often sitting in the early morning sunshine on the chair at the end of the garden, to write about the experiences that they evoked.  It felt like taking a virtual trip there. 

Every day during lockdown, I spoke to my father on the phone, and I started to read out the St Ives experiences to him.  He’s never been to St Ives, but he said that it made him feel as if he was there.  At some point during our conversations I had the idea that what I was writing could be compiled into a book, and decided to make a series of small 6″x6″ paintings to illustrate it, along with some of my original photographs.