I made my first visit to Ireland in the summer of 1994 with the family of my good friend Rob Denshaw. We spent the majority of that trip in the northwestern corner of Ulster in County Donegal. I felt strangely attached to this landscape, which was the most beautiful place I'd ever been. It wasn't until later I discovered that my ancestors came from this part of Ireland, so perhaps there was some sort of genetic memory at work.

I came back from that trip inspired to try and capture some of those places I'd been in oil. I did many paintings afterwards, of which this is one such example — mulled over in my studio for two years after the visit that inspired it. The view here is from the slopes of Cnoc an Tigh, which we clambered over one cold wet afternoon in July. By layering washes of translucent color, my goal here was to capture that feeling of wet peat under a fast moving sky.

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