We are launching a new online shop which will feature different exhibitions throughout the year. The first show, “Lockdown Journeys”, new drawings from 2020 / 21, will run from 29 October to 5 December.

The Glass Palace. Mixed media on paper, 68.5 x 101.5 cm (27 x 40 ins), 2021

Lockdown and the show Japan – Water, which I took part in at the Groundwork Gallery in King’s Lynn in 2021, are behind most of the drawings. They are domestic in scale yet international in reference.

Most of my research has been in my imagination. The imagination is very environmentally friendly. Working for the Japan show and responding to it afterwards, I have been to Japan many times, all without carbon emissions. The locked-down world was much larger. For me there was relief in living in the mind again, and imagining a bigger cleaner world.

I walk some mornings on Glasgow Green. It is always good to walk – and a walk often forms the basis of a picture. It can connect to other walks in my imagination, even ones I didn’t make but someone else did. Like Rousseau, walking from Paris to Geneva. Or Basho, walking north. I would like to walk all the way to Japan. Maybe I should try? Meanwhile, I walk on Glasgow Green and walk around my studio and travel to Japan in my head.

Hokusai has become a friend. I look at his pictures every day. They are postcards from places which I will never visit. Re-employing my imagination to supply colour, incident, passion, encounter.

Something of Japan – Japanese water – has come to Glasgow and flows through my drawings of Glasgow Green.

Other remembered or dreamed landscapes are there as substitutes for the real thing. I cut down on my travel – and make something which still takes me there.