I worked in several studios in Dublin and London, England, and had the priceless opportunity to watch some great professionals at work. During that time I also had access to state-of-the-art darkrooms in which to further my experiments with color, textures, tints and in which to explore printing techniques both traditional and contemporary. The work of such photographers as Nikolai Andreev, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Robert Demachy intrigued me, their impressionist feel touched a nerve, leading to my use of techniques such as adding pigments, layers of texture, painted backgrounds and tints that give my work its unique look and feel.

It was a long and interesting development. The work I produced for my first one-man exhibition in 1982, clearly showed the birth of an style that leads to the images of today.

Now I think of the camera as part of a process, a sketchbook really, to create one of the building blocks in the journey toward my final image.