On a hidden rooftop garden above a London tube station, the Women's Work exhibition programme, and the quiet case for looking up.

I am in London more often than I think I am, and most of the time I look at less of it than I should. The route from station to meeting and back again is the kind of pattern that, once worn, stops registering as a city at all. You walk past the same buildings without seeing them. You stop noticing the river. You become — I have noticed it in myself — a person who has lived near a great place for long enough to have stopped looking at it properly.

On a quiet launch, a brand of one, and the small shop in Egham where I sold my very first painting in 2012.

For the past few months I have been working on something I have not quite been ready to talk about.

This March, my paintings will be in a proper retail shop for the first time. Egham Artisans, in the town next door to mine, will be carrying original work, prints, and postcards as part of my featured Artist of the Month residency. I have rebranded, restructured, and — somewhere between the day job and the studio — quietly turned what has been a hobby into a properly run small business.

On meeting a fellow Berkshire painter who took the leap ten years before I did, and the conversation I did not know I needed.

For weeks I had walked past the door without going in. The residency space — a working artist's studio open to the public in that small window between bodies of work — had appeared in my line of sight maybe a dozen times. I had told myself, each time, that I would pop in "next time, when I have more time." This is something I now recognise as a small lie we tell ourselves when something feels slightly out of reach.

On a stressful journey, a magical weekend, and what a change of scenery can do for a stuck mind.

The first three hours of any trip to Edinburgh from where I live are meant to involve a seat. Mine did not. A booking error I will not bore you with meant I spent the first stretch of the journey sitting on the floor of a train carriage near the doors, bag wedged behind me, watching England flatten and rise and turn finally into Scotland. By the time I had a proper seat I had decided the whole weekend was going to be a write-off.

On a challenge I have set myself, the hundred business cards in my bag, and the first conversation — which turned out to be easier than I had any right to expect.

For most of my adult life, when someone asked what I did, I said "I work in sales." It was an honest answer, and it ended the conversation politely, and it never quite mentioned the thing I had been doing for years on weekends and evenings.

On a weekend with two artist friends, a park in autumn, and the painting that came out of it.

Most of what I do happens alone. The studio is a quiet, particular kind of solitude — necessary, but never quite enough on its own. Painting requires something to paint from, and that something has to come from somewhere outside the four walls where I work.

On the exhibit that made me call myself an artist for the first time.

There is a particular kind of nerve required to walk into a contemporary art fair when you have never quite called yourself an artist.