Do the masters inspire your style?

If you answer this - which being inclined to rush in where angels fear to tread I'm about to - you run the instant risk of being compared with those who influenced you; and that is potentially disastrous. However, it's Rembrandt. Because he could sculpt with paint and create texture with it. I admire many painters, the living as well as the dead, but even though he did very different things - ie, he was a painter of portraits, interiors, figures, and on the whole I'm not - he's the single painter from whom I've learned most and by whom I've been most inspired. If we're to stick with the really old masters, there are few others - and most of them tended to the highly individualistic; so I've always enjoyed El Greco, Caravaggio (wouldn't have liked to have known him, though), and Goya. I can see why you'd be attracted to the Pre-Raphaelites, given your love of precision - they don't appeal to me, for the same reason they appeal to you; so I admire what they did without much enjoying it. Just a different way of seeing things, obviously it's not a value-judgement. If that's the style of painting you appreciate most, by the way, tempera painters might appeal to you - it's a rather demanding discipline, but capable of huge precision while still offering a complex surface. It's not that easy to find painters who specialized in it, historically or presently.

I don't think my style of art is anything like the people's that influenced it, but there are aspects of other artists' work that I admire and learn from. In terms of old masters, the main one for me has to be Joseph Wright of Derby. I just loved the dramatic contrasts he achieved between light and dark. When I was studying art at school I did a big project on chiaroscuro and he was the main artist I studied, as his treatment of light was incredible. I am a big fan of contrasts. Speaking of contrasts, my other major influence was probably LS Lowry, particularly his industrial scenes. I loved the way he was able to simplify his subjects without taking away any of the atmosphere and sense of location. I was once criticised for trying to put too much detail into my pictures (my teacher was correct) and work such as Lowry's reminds me that simplifying is often the key. My other main influence, though not an old master by any means and an illustrator rather than a fine artist, is Arthur Rackham. I love ink drawings and using linework in my watercolours and Rackham made it look effortless. He could get so much detail down with just a few lines. I love the narrative in all his pictures as well - I know that's the point of it - but you don't need to know the story in order to get a sense of one from the pictures. This is what I try to achieve. Robert I can understand what you mean by Rembrandt. I am not a portrait painter but if I was I'd study his work first. There's one of his self-portraits in the gallery here in Edinburgh, I go in sometimes just to stare at it.

I would love to be able to paint textiles like Reynolds, Gainsborough and the Dutch school. You can always tell what fabric it is, the velvets, satins and shot silk. Absolutely marvellous! Unfortunately I never seem to get round to make much of the fabric in a portrait as it tends to be the last part and so I am short of time. But one day.....

I studied Cezanne, and Enlightenment to Romanticism crossover paintings as well as lots of paintings of Napoleon, at Uni; not for their technical artistic qualities but as part of cultural shifts. I like Sisley, Pisarro and Cezanne; and I like Turner and Constable, and there are individual paintings by Goya, Ruisdael and others that I like but I don't think I'd say that any of them consciously influence the way I create. I'm sure they must do in some way but I couldn't put my finger on it