In the late 1990s, in an effort to develop my skills as a watercolourist, I did a course in botanical painting with Susan Sex at the Burren School of Art, but I didn’t follow it up. When the notebook project presented itself I saw it as a way of kick-starting myself back into this challenging and fascinating area again.

However, there was a problem straight away: the paper in the notebook wasn’t suitable for working with watercolours! But necessity being the mother of invention, I removed the original paper and replaced it with a more appropriate kind.

To me, painting is all about colour, and flowers and plants are a great source of inspiration for experimenting with colour. It’s also a wonderful challenge to find the patterns in the apparent chaos that plants present and to try and grasp the geometry and structure that give them their beauty and indeed functionality – they’re not just there for us admire! And as a gardener, I have in front of my eyes a procession of constantly changing colours, shapes and textures throughout the year, so I have no shortage of subjects to paint.

The notebook project was a way of observing, noting, drawing and making rough watercolour sketches both as exercises and possibly as starting points for fully worked paintings. I’m now in the process of undertaking more complex paintings with colour as their central core.