Nick Penn is a sometime oceanographer, naturalist, systems engineer and gardener. He lives and works in Cornwall and draws, paints and makes prints for pleasure. He likes to work out of doors immersed in the landscape where, on a good day, he can become utterly absorbed and achieve the elusive state of ‘flow’. A passionate sketch-booker, he works variously in pencil, dip-pen and wash, brush-pens or watercolour depending on the type of mark-making that the subject calls for. He has a piecemeal training in art: a distance-learning foundation course with the Open College of the Arts in the 1990s has been followed most years by attendance at a short course at an art school, latterly Newlyn Art School. His early sketch-booking was almost exclusively monochrome before experimenting with colour during the last 10 years. A recent oil-painting course with the Norfolk Painting School during lockdown has opened up new possibilities for mark-making.