Almost all my paintings are built up with layers of paint. I know some artists like to finish paintings fairly quickly. For them, the idea of building up layer after layer feels like a waste of time and effort. But I have come to love the slow process of adding paint and then removing some of it in order to build up textures and effects that I simply couldn't create on purpose.

Effects like this:

or this:  

or this: 

These are extreme close-ups - they are just small sections of a larger painting, so from a distance these textures don't show up. But from a distance they still add a sense of depth and resonance to a painting and when you come closer, they give you more to look at.

I think of them as an extra gift. You see a painting that you like, you move closer and then you start to notice little things happening and so you spend longer looking. Your mind tries to make sense of the marks or lines ... 'is that a house? That looks like grass' - but the marks defy translation. They simply are there - something extra to enjoy, like a gift from the artist to the viewer.

They also play a hugely important role in my current work. I am creating a series of paintings as a response to the landscape poetry of Ted Hughes. So much of his work was about the effect of weather and time on the landscape, and the way that human civilisation comes and goes, while nature continues undeterred. (He was writing pre-global warming awareness of course!) So the layers in my paintings help to represent these ideas as well as the textures and sights and sounds of my local landscape.

This is a constant exploration - a perpetual search for ways to communicate these ideas and to evoke an emotional response. And so I apply thick and thin layers of paint, add pencil, cover part of that pencil up with a thin glaze, remove some paint with rubbing alcohol, add some more, use sandpaper to remove some of that, try different mark-making tools ... it's an exploration I hope will never end.

And just like the landscape, even the things that get covered up never really go away. They create extra texture or depth, or add richness to a colour layered over top.

In this way, painting is exactly like life: everything leaves it's mark. Everything makes a difference. Everything adds to the experience.