Extract from  "Oak, one tree, three years, fifty paintings" Stephen Taylor, foreword Alain de Botton, Princeton Architechtural Press, 2011

'I discovered a field sloping gently south to a small stream with willow trees. Low hedges ran along its other three sides, and from the northeast corner I could see the whole field laid out in  front of me beneath a low horizon of distant fields and trees - an ordinary Essex country scene. Painting from here, the sun and moon would rise on my left and set to my right. I would be undisturbed and free to come and go as I pleased.

It was a journey that explored  a single location,  and it helped me to recover a sense of where I was in life. I drew from the  tradition that I felt most strongly about, of observed landscape, but I wanted to show that  landscape painting -  nature painting - could be modern. I would make six-feet-wide paintings like  Constable, but they would be new.  I began to work on ways that would help me paint nature in a  fresh way and to help me make visual contact with this new place.

I made different visual maps of what I saw. I plotted small changes of height on the horizon from contours of an Ordinance Survey map. I used the base of clouds to create a perspective grid  in the sky, and I painted the crop as a texture gradient. For elusive, changing colours, I devised  a method of colour mapping using observed, painted colours and digital images...'