I had always wanted to put brush to canvas and paint what my eye could see, sadly this ability was never to be mastered - photography however changed all that. I learnt how to take a photograph at the age of 20, it took me another 30 years to publicly express with a lens what my maturer eye visioned - that there is beauty all around, it only has to be seen. The camera has the ability to take the mundane and turn it into the magnificent - we just have to stop and stare a while and staring is the way that this ‘Still Life’ session came about. I had filled a small glass vase with roses from the garden to compliment a dinner table setting, the following morning over a much needed coffee I stared at the arrangement and thought how pretty it looked, short stemmed roses in a goldfish bowl environment, then the thought occurred to me capture it. It was only when I looked at the arrangement through a lens that I really saw the many ‘faces’ of our dinner table accessory. A while later and a little electronic tweaking I had turned the clock back 35 years and achieved my ‘painting’. I had not started out to produce a set of cards and stage a flowery scenario, what you see on the front of this card is the result of a moment whereupon I took the time to stare - try it you’ll be surprised at what you can see . . . . .

There is a most astonishing addition to this story which happened after I had finished designing the cards. Many times over my ‘artistic’ lifetime my mother has said that whilst carrying me as a baby she would always look at natures beauty trying to transfer it and the ability to see beauty in all things to me. It was after creating these cards that I thought I had come the closest to that which she wished for me - so in my weekly call to London I decided to tell her that fact. I was about to read her the passage on this card when she went off on a tangent and quoted two lines from a poem stating that she didn’t know what the poem was and she always missed most of it (being used as a commercial on British TV) but remembered this passage and always thought of me when she saw it, as she quoted the lines I went icy cold - without knowing it she had pinpointed my favorite poem and quoted the exact two lines I had placed on this and every card I produce . . . . .

“What is this life if full of care
we have no time to stop and stare . . .”