Ancient buildings, ruins and antiquities can offer superb compositions for the artist, and journeys in many countries have brought me countless such subjects. For most of my adult life I have explored places in the Middle East where ancient sites abound. Often these sites still have ancient stone columns, pediments, decorated capitals, carved lintels, and all manner of broken but delightfully crafted bits of stonework, all lying around in scattered abundance that in a western country would probably be put away and preserved well out of sight for eternity. Added to this we can still find local characters hanging around in , , and colourful local
