Both my parents are Swiss, they came to the UK before I was born, had me here and I’ve lived in Britain all my life. When I was a child I fell in love with the mountains in Switzerland – they looked so powerful and pure, with such incredibly clean colours. I painted my first Swiss Alp painting in 1997 and I’ve been painting them ever since.

The Alps represent my Swissness to me in an idealised, romanticised way, in a nostalgic way too because I’m mostly remembering them.

As well as that autobiographical need to make these paintings, I’m interested in the structure of the rock and the quality of the light. To see the structure you need to capture the shadows on the mountain with the sunlight at the same angle over the whole scene, which is momentary - the shadows change a lot in half an hour - which is why I work looking at photos I’ve taken or found in books and add my experience of how light in the Alps feels. That feeling comes from a very fine balance between seven or eight colours, each of which I mix and amend many many times…