'I'm a bit shocked that people do think my paintings are photographs, but it's great,' says Richard. 'It's hard to understand how a painting has been painted backwards, because you're only seeing the front, but when people see the window in which is in the back of the painting, they get to see just what's on the back!'

Richard is the very forefront of the technique of painting on glass, one of the reasons being that he's always pushing his delicate and precise skills more and more and pioneering new ways of working. He applies and manipulates the paint using fine brushes and special tools of his own invention, made to his own exacting specifications, leading to the creation of stunning, atmospheric landscapes in his Wimbledon studio.

The work he creates is incredibly labour-intensive from start to finish. 'Shading colour is one of the finer things to do, and black and white is even harder,' says Richard. 'It takes so much time and what people don't see is how many times I'm cleaning the brush. When I work across the painting, I need to constantly change the colour on the brush and then clean it and then start again. So, each brush stroke is cleaned whereas normally you'd have a brush stroke and just keep painting and blending'.

It's not just creating the artwork which takes a very long time, the pieces need to dry correctly too; he's been known to go to his studio at the end of the garden at 3am to check the process of a piece. Richard is always finding challenging subject matter, too; the more difficult the better. 'It's always the things that I can't paint, or it seems impossible to paint, that I've wanted to paint the most,' he says, 'which is why I paint the Milky Way. It's a way of testing myself and developing my technique. With all the new styles of work I do, it's a matter of experimenting with new ways of working. With the Milky Way, it's a whole different bag of tricks, so I've had to work out how to take paint away, and add it in.'

The exhilarating unpredictability of nature has taken Richard around the world, and his family are very much part of these trips - and his art. His wife and two children are often symbolised in his paintings by four birds or stars. 'My son and daughter have become very interested in the Milky Way and how it works, and the more places we've been in the world where you can see it, the more they've been obsessed by it. 'It's a family business that I'm in - it's not just me painting, it's what the whole family are doing; where we go on holiday, what we're looking at, and how interested I can make the kids in my work. We have a telescope and we're looking at stars and seeing what the universe is all about. It's great to bring their excitement as well as mine into the work.

'They're starting to want to design my pictures themselves and to be a part of it; they see me doing it every day in my studio and they just wanted more Milky Way and I looked for ways to paint it, and how to put them into the works. Sometimes I've put four birds in, or four stars close together and I've done lightning strikes, which have four parts to them as well. Putting the family first is what we're all about but putting the family into the picture is even nicer as well because they feel part of it all.'

Richard has always shown a talent for art. When he took his A-levels, he was awarded the highest grade for Art in the country. The importance of detail in Richard's work has always been there, too; as a teenager he'd spend a whole summer painting a single subject. Richard studied Fine Art at university, and after pursuing an initial short art career, he decided to get a job working in motorsports. This role took him around the world and influenced his future art - he saw an incredible sunset in Argentina which he subsequently painted a few years later.

Richard returned to art after he had a car accident. He took his work to galleries and they sold so well that he soon found he couldn't get hold of new canvases fast enough. This is when his father suggested he paint on some leftover glass panels he had, and so Richard's signature style was born; his immense craft and artistry can now be seen in every inch of his artwork.