Artist statement

I like to draw and I like to paint. For me they are two quite distinct activities.

In my paintings I work from memory, vision, idea, metaphor, hearsay or sensation. The time and light of day is significant for me in terms of colour and mood, and my paintings reflect my thoughts about occasions, not as a blinding truth (like a newspaper article) but more ambiguously.

My drawings are usually small in scale and in a pencil monotone of many greys. I am prompted to draw what I experience and what I think about. In drawing I tend to reify an event, a thought, or an imagining. Drawing quite frequently clarifies my perception and might lead to a painting. However, in drawing there is something of the intimacy of handwriting, of things said quietly, perhaps in confidence. It is not a loud medium.

My paintings carry the vibrations of many colours and textures and they can vary in size. My working methodology involves a reckoning between colour, causality and the idea until such time that the painting takes on a life of its own.

I expect a painting to be read as much by how it is painted as by what it depicts. Paintings have the mysterious grace of their absolute fixedness. It is this their very stillness that crystallises them and redeems them.

Thus looking at paintings enchants me and making paintings and drawings absorbs me endlessly.