I am an artist who lives in Auckland N.Z., and I have been painting mainly in oils for well over a decade. Although I have painted numerous subjects, landscape is my favorite genre, and I choose to paint almost exclusively in a monochromatic palette. Recently, unsatisfied with my self-teaching, I attended Unitec, a large polytechnic institute in Auckland’s Central-Western suburbs, where I completed a Bachelor’s degree in Design and Visual Arts, majoring in painting, along with printmaking, and digital image technology. It was in the last year of this course, 2011, that I moved to complete abstraction, which continued up until a very recent (Jan 2013) return to my favored practice of landscape painting. I work primarily from photographic sources, although I stress the artist’s need to thoroughly research and “embrace” the subject, as I like to put it.