I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

I've come up through art school through painting through graphic design through advertising through TV commercials and music video. I've designed books built billboards matchbooks corporate identities. I continuously paint I've done conceptual art pictures.

Leon Theremin's original designs are elegant ingenious and effective. As electronics goes the theremin is very simple. But there are so many subtleties hidden in the details of the design. It's like a great sonnet or a painting or a speech that is perfectly done on more than one level.

While I was at college studying design I decided to paint. I was also greatly inspired by the colours that I had seen on my travels in the Brazilian Rain forest.

When I was very very young seven years old I heard there was school where you could go to learn to draw. That was my absolute driven passion to become an artist or a painter. So the romantic realist in me I studied to be a graphic design artist and an art teacher.

I actually started as a model builder and quickly progressed into production design which made sense because I could draw and paint. But I kept watching that guy over there who was moving the actors around and setting up the shots.

I learn my lines while on the golf course. I try to do two or three things at once. I have ideas for books all the time I have ideas for paintings all the time and I write them all down. I take my sketchpad and my iPad which I design on and I do sit down and do specific tasks at specific times.

The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes.

Last year my boyfriend gave me a painting - a very personal one. I really prefer personal gifts or ones made by someone for me. Except diamonds. That's the exception to the rule.

My parents were both actors my dad sort of quite early on. My mother acted for a while and now she's a painter.