The summer holidays during school were often spent travelling with my mother and brothers in a Volkswagen Beetle to visit my grandfather. He would spend his every spare moment making art, usually oil pastel pictures of fields and flowers, bluebells in spring, in vivid arrays of blues, crimsons and pinks, and nearly always on black paper. I would watch him create through his cigarette smoke. The paintings would line his living room walls. And my mother would paint too; grand sea cliffs and cathedral scenes with misty watercolours. And I was entranced by some of the ephemeral watercolours of an Irish painter, Mildred Anne Butler, who would focus on the nature that surrounded her. I began to make pilgrimages to the galleries of London and Dublin.

At the same time as I was making my own art I developed a keen interest in flying machines, an interest inherited from my father. The science of aviation began to intertwine with art; a combination of technology and the ephemeral. This initially unnatural combination was eventually explored through my architectural education in the UK where the technologies of construction were mixed with the philosophies of the arts and aesthetics. Architectural projects at university were always accompanied by paintings.