Growing up I was the scientific child, not the artistic one in my family.

Except one day, depressed to the point of not seeing the point of getting up in the morning, I made the outrageous decision to ditch my serious engineering job to go to art school.

I was 27, just about to make it in a sensible career after four years of university and another four of entry level engineering positions, when suddenly I was back at school with black-garbed, angst-oozing 16 year olds.

My angst was all about ‘could I, the non-artistic one, do anything creative enough that I wouldn’t be laughed out of the class?’ All the engineering prowess in the world didn’t help. I was all at sea in a new universe…

And I went back to what I knew… what had made me ‘not the artistic one.’ In a home where the pinnacle of artistic taste was paraded on the walls in the form of the idyllic realism of John Constable, I had always messed with what I saw: stretched it, multicoloured it, exaggerated it.

So, if you’re looking for realistic, you might need to look elsewhere…