I’ve been trying to capture and describe ways of feeling and being in the world. My pictures are full of heads, faces, bodies, body-parts, all coming into relation with each other, often in strange ways, ways that conjure up for me emotional realities.
Everything we say and do, everything we see, everything we think and feel, we experience in our bodies as much as in our minds. The two are the same thing. Our sense of who and what we are changes according to the situation and to the feelings we have about it.
Intuitions, words, ideas, passions, flow between and into us, nurture and transform us, damage us maybe. A figure might burst into leaf, anything could happen.
Masks, attitudes, veils, uniforms, rituals, myths, are ways of representing ourselves to ourselves and others, but also of protecting ourselves from continual transformation. They connect us with and distance us from one another. They make what’s behind them mysterious, alluring, perhaps threatening, perhaps irrelevant.
When I paint or draw, a story or situation might start to develop in my mind from the marks that I make. A snatch of story rather than a full blown narrative. A sense of some kind of an event or part of an event.
Texture and colour are very important to me: endlessly exciting and surprising. I like to feel that I am not completely controlling the process, that it is leading me down paths I would never have thought to go down. But I do want a painting to be beautiful in some way, even when the subject matter is odd or difficult.