I love fantasy art but not the type necessarily with fairies, although I do own a watercolour fairy painting book. And it's a beauty. By fantasy I mean inspiration, grand, awe-inspiring. It might be a picture of grand mountains, misty valleys, sweeps of landscape or the majesty of a horse or the wild cats.

Colour is important but for me it's not the bright colours, the garish colours. It's the richness of a painting that grabs me. Additionally, there has to be that glow, that feeling, that connection - that pull that hauls you into the world of the painting.

However, my start with art by no means assured me of a place in the "art world". High school art class, looking back, was a disaster - the dull, academic approach to teaching in no way got me enthused about painting for myself. I still have my artwork from school and it's by no means worthy of any accolades. But my drawing abilities were quite good, surprisingly.

That's where I wish those teachers had instructed us more fully on the feelings and emotions that create beautiful works of art. And that would have boosted my confidence and I would have wanted to paint and maybe even made a career out of it.

There's something that's indefinite about certain paintings, not solid, that attracts me. I'm not saying I necessarily want the ethereal or the unreal, but I enjoy the distance, the secretive, the longing, the desire reaching out....for instance, words that come to me are - space, eternity, vistas, distance.... This may be why I love the Lord of the Rings trilogy movies. The hugeness of the story and the inclusion of gigantic beings existing with the people, both coexisting in a majestic landscape; the special effects used to create monstrous "elephants", huge talking trees, cities merging with mountains, villages hidden away in distant gorges, massive gates hiding enormous worlds of power.

I haven't attained what I'm reaching for but the joy is in the doing. So I don't know what it is, can't put it into words, but for those of us who are the "feelers" of the world there is something rich and satisfying yet unreachable about all that beauty. But as long as we have those feelers out, like antannae, one day we'll reach what we long for.