When I first moved to Nicosia, I taught English to foreign students for a year. My classroom was on the 3rd floor, overlooking the main square of the city. It was such an amazing conglomerate of patterns and warm colours, minarets and domes, and inspired me to begin a series of drawings from the flat rooftop of the college. The view led to me searching out other rooftops, and I created many oil paintings from the drawings and watercolours. I also painted the city from memory, as I began to know Nicosia better than my home town. Eventually I sought to catch elusive qualities such as sounds, the breezes, people's lives contained within window frames or their washing left out for days on flat rooves. The life of the city began to take over from recording architecture.