When I paint, I work in the open air to capture the building or landscape in front of me in one sitting. A bit like the travelling artists of the Grand Tour or the painters in the tradition of Plein-Air, I like to absorb the atmosphere of the place in that moment, sometimes adding personal notes or memories of the experience and location. I grew up on a farm in Tuscany, attending Art school in Florence. I then studied architecture at Cambridge, before going on to become a Rome Scholar at The British School of Rome. My love of history, buildings, landscapes and culture are central to how I look at spaces and paint them. My work has been exhibited in London, Rome, Naples and Florence and is in collections in Europe, Australia and the US.

You can see my work sub-divided by my main areas:
Tuscany, which is where I grew up, Provence which I love visting with my family and London, where I now live. Other include the Ile de Re, and Hertfordshire.

How I paint

I paint on site, sitting where I can and trying to stay out of the flow of people. I use light-weight, portable paints and paper - normally hardback sketchbooks from Saunders-Waterford and tin watercolor boxes.

The emphasis is on portability and speed of use - there's something special about capturing a scene in one sitting. My focus is on the building so you'll sometimes see areas barely sketched in, if they're not the main focus I'll just put enough detail in to keep the shape of the scene.

I tend to use one paintbrush, one simple box of paints and either a fountain-pen or dip-nib with a bottle of ink. My Saunders-Waterford sketchbooks are traditionally bound, so in every book I will have several double-spreads where I can use the whole width of two pages, and just unstitch the thread later to release the whole sheet, as in this painting of the interior of St Barts near Smithfields in London.

I carry all of this in a shoulder-bag, with a small, collapsible stool as well. The heaviest thing is often the water, as I do like to be able to refresh it a few times.