Statements

On The Paintings

Painting is a bridge between coloured mud and the flight of the imagination; the earth and ether; the material world and the lived moment of consciousness; between the most intimately known, body sensation, and utter otherness. The image has to live on that bridge.

My work is ‘about’ empathy with kinds of life and its environs. This seems very pertinent to how we and the planet are now. But I am not banging on any drum of an issue. My central concern is in bringing together areas of feeling, which involves a concentration on touch and instinct, allowing an independent and poignant parallel life.

Drawing From and For the Parallel World

I draw copiously. They are notes, reportage, diagrams, collected seeds and specimens from and for the parallel world of painting.
Many are done with the hand following a rhythm, a contour or essence of which the eye and brain know little or nothing. The tracking of an evasive quarry – feeling.
Others are gathered from the shadows this world casts on the inner or painted one.
They are a delving, scratched and seeping and leaking and reaching to unfurl.
They are an irritant and a temporary cure to an insatiable itch.
They are X-rays and representations in section.
They are patches of life and traces after an event.
They are the insemination of forms and the formation of environments.
They constellate a chaotic network of desires.
They are a scattered rebus and minute glyphs speculating on other Being.
They are scripts toward an approach to a sustainable creation.

They glimmer and are glimpsed, hunted and caught and copied and ignored and projected larger and cut and torn and trampled and insulted into stencils and besmirched and corrected and erased. And interpreted and resurrected.