As a surgeon, he's used to having a steady hand.
And Mr Shehzad Latif will be swapping his scalpel for a brush when he competes in a painting competition later this month.
The Swansea Bay University Health Board doctor will compete against three other amateur artists when he appears on Channel 5’s Watercolour Challenge.
READ MORE: Firefighters called to house fire in Swansea caused by overheated hairdryer
The competitors are being tasked with capturing different Welsh landscapes.
The daytime show, presented by Fern Britton, gives the artists four hours to paint, in watercolour, the same scene or landscape, often with widely different interpretations, before moving onto another location.
Mr Latif said: “I do watercolours and pastels, mainly landscapes, with Rhossili being my favourite place to paint. It really is one of the most beautiful spots. The other place I have become really fond of is the Loughor Estuary, it has beautiful skies.”
Mr Latif applied to appear on the show by sending off some of his paintings to the programme-makers.
He said: “One of the producers got in touch via zoom and said she really liked my work but it would be up to the judges. Six weeks later I had an email saying, 'congratulations, you have been chosen as one of the four contestants'.
“The first two sessions took place in Crickhowell, on the Glanusk Estate. It was a beautiful location looking across towards Pen y Fan. Then we moved on to St Donats, near Llantwit Major, before finishing off in the heritage park in the Rhondda.
“As is typical in Wales, we had the whole gamut of the four seasons within two hours. The first day was nice and warm, beautiful sunshine, and then one hour into the contest I saw the clouds approach and then we had the wind, the hail and the rain. It was fun running from one place to another, trying to save our work.”
Mr Latif, who is based in Morriston Hospital and specialises in abdominal wall reconstruction, said that despite his love of painting, it would never come in conflict with his work.
He said: "I learnt a lot. From the runners to the cameramen, and from Fern to the judges, the whole production team were remarkable. It was an interesting format, we were just told to paint and the judges came around towards the end and selected the winner of that programme. I believe the viewers will be asked to select the overall winner of the series.
"But I love my job too much to take up painting full time.”
Mr Latif, a member of the Swansea Arts Society who has previously displayed his work in Singleton Hospital, is selling some of his work to raise money for a charity close to his heart.
“As a member of the British Obesity Metabolic Society of Surgeons, for whom I am also poet in residence, I always turn up armed with my poems and paintings. The members really look forward to it. And some of my paintings are going to be sold on the Obesity UK Society’s website to raise money for the charity.”
He is also a talented poet having won praise from the judges in the international Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine for his poem Singleton Hospital at Night and a poem on spina bifida, inspired by his son who has the condition.
He will appear on Watercolour Challenge on January 31.
Get Swansea stories straight to your inbox with our newsletter.
