I’m walking the streets of a broken town and the only way for me to cope with it is to paint it. So I fill up my pack with paint, grab a canvas and start painting on the streets, squeezing the paint from the tubes directly onto the canvas.

In earlier years I painted days and nights – one image every hour on a single canvas divided into 24 sections. Just to see what a day looks like. From there I captured years. I painted 365 paintings running up and down large canvases. I documented visitors, landscapes seen from my window, and news heard on the radio. I spent the next year painting each section of a painting at a specific time – five in the afternoon – showing the changing seasonal light of a year. My last year-long painting was of 400 skies seen from my studio window – a net of blue with passing clouds and stars and a lunar eclipse.

When I was young I loved the work of Toss Woollaston, Colin McCahon and Philip Clairmont. Their work still knocks me off my feet. In 1993 I exhibited in Munich and had my first chance to travel overseas and see the works of other painters I’d long admired. The work of the German Expressionists, Rembrandt, and Vincent Van Gogh affirmed to me that I was heading in the right direction.

Following the Christchurch earthquakes in 2011, I provided street scene paintings for the courtroom of the Royal Commission Hearings into the safety of buildings. All of the paintings were painted either on the footpath or propped against cordon fences. Dust blew into them. People talked to me about their experiences as I worked and I’d tell them mine.

I am still painting the ghost streets of the red zone.